Line #4 Headscratchers/MeetTheParents


1	* How can you be "one twenty third" Jewish?
2	** By climbing your family tree back up until you find out who's your Jewish ancestor.
3	** The question probably means, how do you have an odd integer fraction.
4	** ''Roughly'' one twenty-third maybe?
5	** by having a 11x great grandparent who was Jewish, that means the other wasn't, 11 generations is 20 grandparents and his own 2 parents, Jack is the 23rd, making him 1/23rd Jewish.
6	*** That's not how that works though. Ancestry calculations are logarithmic and always a power of two. One parent would make you half Jewish, one grandparent would make you 1/4, a great-grandparent 1/8, etc. 23 is a prime number, so the only thing you could get is an approximation like having 2 Jewish ancestors 6 generations back and 3 more 8 generations back.
7	* Jack and Dina had a son in his late teens/early twenties in the first film who played an important role in the misunderstandings, but is nowhere to be seen in the sequels. The third film involves an heir to the Byrnes name and he's not mentioned at all. Did he die? Did he and Jack have a falling out due to his pot smoking?
8	** Considering how much of an asshole Jack is, my guess is that the son got sick of his shit and stopped speaking to him.
9	** It was Denny.
10	** The second film mentioned him being sent to military school.
11	** He is seen on the family tree. Perhaps Jack thought he was too irresponsible to be the head of the family?
12	* Why is the rest of the Byrnes family so harsh to Greg? It kind of makes sense that Jack wouldn't trust him, PapaWolf and everything, but the entire family is pretty rude to him the moment they meet him.
13	** They're probably afraid they'll end up on Jack's bad side, if they're seen being nice to someone Jack has it in for.
14	** Plain and simple, he didn't fit in. He was Jewish, a male nurse, and pretty mediocre-seeming, and when they had seen perfection (in the form of [[TheAce Kevin]]), it was hard for them to accept Pam dating anything less.
15	*** For what it's worth, they seem to treat him civilly enough when they first meet him, albeit a bit condescending, and even Jack, after finding out that Greg knows about his CIA past, seems willing, to give him a chance if he doesn't fall out of line, although he is a bit passive aggressive about it. It's mainly after his luck takes a turn for the worse, and his actions end up negatively affecting them that their opinion of him begins to sour and they actively show disdain for him. Greg doesn't exactly help his case by trying to excuse his actions instead of admitting his mistakes.
16	* Why did Pam never do anything to stop her family from being rude of Greg or try to stop Greg from continually lying? The moment she put her foot down at the end, Jack let off. Why not do that earlier? Granted, the movie would've been shorter but they could have hand waved it somehow by having Pam be gone for most of it. Instead, she comes off as pretty dense or at least apathetic that her loved ones are being so cruel to one another.
17	** Most of the time nobody says or does anything that harsh to Greg directly in front of Pam, and Greg's responses could be interpreted by Pam as him overreacting as she doesn't believe Jack has ever been ''that'' bad to previous relationships. When Jack went over-the-top at the end, Pam was basically caught up in the current series of revelations, and only calmed down after Greg had left and she had time to process what she had done.
18	* Why didn't Pam tell Greg that the rest of her family was coming over the next day? Didn't she think Greg would want to at least look presentable in front of her family after Jack was already giving him so much crap? And why didn't she ''wake him up?'' Not telling him the rest of her family was coming was one thing, but couldn't she have given him a heads up beforehand? She didn't seem to take his feelings into consideration a lot.
19	** Like how she didn't mention her past relationship to Kevin to Greg, she might have not thought about how overwhelming her family could be to an outsider because she's relatively used to their behaviour.
20	* If Jack was mostly a psychologist for CIA why was his cover a florist and not a psychologist consultant or something?
21	** People talk easier to shopkeepers. Think about it, how many people do you know will go to a store and go "hey [shopkeeper], how are things? Did you know little [Insert Name Here] passed his spelling test? Oh, and my cousin finally got that job he wanted." People will tell shopkeepers a helluva lot more than most people will tell a psych, also shopkeepers can get more "business" and nobody bats an eye, while a psych getting a ton of clients is a little eyebrow raising.
22	** Relatedly, how is it that despite having that cover for presumably many years, he still seems clueless about plants? Surely, he would have read up on it, or least passively gained information from conversation.
23	* In the second movie, who left the "circle of trust with Greg outside of it" drawing on Greg's shirt after the truth serum scene? Was it Jack or Pam?
24	** Possibly Jack.
25	** Definitely Jack. He's the only one who makes a big deal about the Circle of Trust, and is always holding it over Greg that his place inside the circle is contingent upon Jack's goodwill.
26	* In the second movie, why was a TV channel broadcasting ''Film/Scarface1983'' before 9pm?
27	** It's probably a movie channel like HBO, Cinemax, etc.

Context Headscratchers / MeetTheParents