Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Ryujin]

After just having watched "Stargate: SG1": Why does no one just say "debark", instead of "disembark"? It's like saying "getting un-in" instead of just "getting out."

 

[Guest 7030100]

After just having watched "Stargate: SG1": Why does no one just say "debark", instead of "disembark"? It's like saying "getting un-in" instead of just "getting out."

I though "debark" was the word for when a dog says, "foow! foow!"

 

[MGibster]

Stephen King gets guns wrong sometimes. In his short story "Mile 81," an extra-terrestrial disguised as a car is eating people at a rest stop. A state trooper investigating is described as taking the safety off his Glock pistol but Glocks don't work like that. They have a trigger safety, which isn't the type you turn on or off. Does it matter within the context of the story? No, not at all. It is truly a pointless nitpick.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I can't remember if it's in Inferno or The Lost Symbol, but in one of them Dan Brown has Harvard professor Robert Langdon's office in a classroom and his classes dismissed by bells like he's a high school teacher. In a fit of generosity, I checked Brown's bio to see if he went to Yale or Princeton and this was a subtle dig at Harvard students. In which case, well done. Alas, he did not.

 

[Larnievc]

I wanted to start a thread about your pointless and ridiculous nitpicks of TV shows, movies and books.

This includes ones where you nitpicked something but turned out to be wrong about it! Those are welcome! Serious, genuine plotholes and real problems, nah, I want pointless and precise little ones that don't really matter, but that annoyed you enough to nitpick it. Did someone fire a gun that with a 8 round magazine 10 times without reloading? Did someone refer to a country that didn't exist yet? Act as if something was common in a time period when it was not? All these and more!

Here are a couple of my own pointless nitpicks:

1) Reacher (TV series) - Reacher hands someone a USB thumb drive, the "normal" kind (USB-A) to read on their laptop. This person (a thirty-something, not a child) picks up their (explicitly theirs - not borrowed or w/e) sticker-covered laptop, which implies they've had it for months if not years and used it a lot, and tries to put the USB drive in it, and is totally surprised that their laptop doesn't have a USB-A port. No. This is not thing that would happen. No-one who uses a laptop a ton and has had it a while doesn't know whether it has a USB-A port or not (even if they don't know what those are by name!). It's the most basic port and the one you absolutely know if you have or not because it's huge relative to USB-C. Not plausible!

2) Rivers of London (book series) - I forget which book this happens in, but a minor plot point hinges on the private St Paul's girls school in London being a school that has some boarders even though it's not a boarding school primarily (i.e. pupils who live at the school). There are some private schools in the UK like this (as well as full-on boarding schools where the majority of pupils board there). The book relies on it having them, and the author is fairly scrupulous in his research about real London things. Unfortunately, however, St Paul's girls does not, and has not in like, the last 30 years, had boarders. I knew this because I went to a nearby-ish school and kids talk, but I double-checked to see if that had changed, and it had not.

I am fairly sure I am the only person who picked up on, let alone cared about, either of these things!

@Whizbang Dustyboots - I appreciated your "Terminator 1 got the nightclub scene wrong because no-one was dressed cool enough for a nightclub in 1984". That's the kind of energy I'm looking for here!

Spike using Americanism when he talks.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, remembered another one.

This was from an episode of The 4400 (original, though the reboot is worth watching too). A character has gone back to high school, and is working hard. They have a biology paper they are working on, and the audience sees the paper's title on the front page.

"The Mitosis Phase of Cell Division".

This was such an imbecilic error. The paper's topic is not plot relevant. There is no need for the audience to even see the paper - the stack of work we see could have had a textbook on top. Or, they could have glanced at a wikipedia page to know what to actually say there. But... no, they didn't.

 

[Dioltach]

I can't remember if it's in Inferno or The Lost Symbol, but in one of them Dan Brown has Harvard professor Robert Langdon's office in a classroom and his classes dismissed by bells like he's a high school teacher. In a fit of generosity, I checked Brown's bio to see if he went to Yale or Princeton and this was a subtle dig at Harvard students. In which case, well done. Alas, he did not.

Dan Brown... The whole premise of the Da Vinci Code falls apart if you know the very basics of the background to the Grail legend. (Spoiler: no, there's no possible way it could ever be "sang real".)

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Dan Brown... The whole premise of the Da Vinci Code falls apart if you know the very basics of the background to the Grail legend. (Spoiler: no, there's no possible way it could ever be "sang real".)

Sure, I don't expect much from Brown. But the classroom office/bell thing seemed like such a weird thing to get wrong. It was jarring.

 

[Dausuul]

In "The Fellowship of the Ring," when explaining the story of the Ring to Frodo, Gandalf says, "I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was -- that at least was clear from the first."

Gandalf doesn't explain his reasoning, but he is definitely claiming to have known "from the first" that Bilbo held a Great Ring. Gandalf knows the whereabouts of the Three (he himself holds one), so at this point he has already pegged Bilbo's as being one of the Seven, one of the Nine, or the Ruling Ring.

And later, quoting Saruman in some past conversation: "The Three, the Seven, and the Nine had each their proper stone. Not so the One. It was round and unadorned..."

At this point, Gandalf had all the information he needed to identify the Ring. Yet it wasn't till Bilbo's birthday party that he took up the search in earnest, and he still spent seventeen years confirming his suspicion before acting. WTF, dude?

(I classify this as a ridiculous nitpick because all you have to do is replace "a Great Ring" with "one of the Rings forged in the Second Age" or some such -- allowing for Bilbo's to be one of the lesser Rings -- and it fixes everything. Tolkien just muffed one sentence in a work of immense scope and complexity; and it was one of very few errors. I mean, you can trace the logistics of Mordor's assault on Gondor and Rohan's race to defend it, with supply chains and armies advancing on multiple fronts, and everything hangs together perfectly. But that one throwaway line still bugs me.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Clearly this version of Dulles airport exists in its own specific dimension, where approaching planes can't divert to another airport if they're unable to establish contact with the airport they're supposed to be going to.

If only the DC metro airport had multiple international airports!