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  • In Ark Angel, The Dragon has the world tattooed on his face as part of a disguise, hiding this with a latex mask. This is canonically stated to be "very painful". Why didn't he just put the tattoos on the latex mask?
    • Because... that makes sense. We can't have The Dragon making sense when they are supposed to be cool and support the Big Bad in obscene ways, can we?
    • Because it wouldn't show his devotion to the world. He'd be just another guy wearing a stupid mask to hide his face. Less sarcastically, he said that the world was his true face, metaphorically as well as tattooically.
  • All of the book titles have had some reference to the contents, and out of the blue we get Crocodile Tears. Why?
    • Because a good chunk of the book is set in Africa, the Big Bad's plan involves creating a famine in Africa so that he can hemorrhage money sent via his charity, hence the tears part and the Big Bad attempts to feed Alex to crocodiles.
    • Also because Crocodile Tears are a term for tears that are shed by someone who is only pretending to be sad, fitting considering that the tragedy that the bad guy is manufacturing a tragedy to raise charity that he's going to steal for himself.
    • I honestly believe that Horowitz's titling strategy is to think up a cool name then work it into the story. This one was just a bit more troublesome than the others.
    • The title makes sense. If anything it's the title that works best because it ties into the theme of the book, rather than simply referring to an object, location or organization Compare to, say, Snakehead, where the titular human traffickers play a minor to medium role in the plot, basically serving as the Mooks who are barely if at all aware, or even involved, in the Evil Plan of the Big Bad, and vanish for much of the story, including the finale`
  • In Scorpia why does Alex take off his disguise when he's going to kill Mrs Jones? I can accept that he may have wanted to see her face to face, but leaving the stuff in the lift? And he broke his mask while he was pulling it off. How did he plan to get out? Did he want to get caught?
    • Scorpia probably had some plan for that. I doubt that an agency as powerful as them would let an amateur mistake like that pass.
      • But Alex should know better.
      • Perhaps subconsciously he did want to get caught.
  • Formula is fun, but couldn't we once...just once get a villain who has read the Evil Overlord List. I mean seriously, I don't expect any experts, but someone just give it a light perusal so that Alex's success doesn't just hinge on the bad guy spelling out his plan in minute detail, giving away everything that Alex needs to do in order to thwart him.
    • Well, you know how some bad guys are. Besides, when they're placed in certain situations (like when Alex suffered a Heroic BSoD after Jack died in Scorpia Rising) the bad guys feel completely safe. One of them even admitted that he told Alex everything just to get rid of the silence. Sometimes you just gotta roll with it, no matter how asinine it may be.
    • Razim from Scorpia Rising has studied and tries to correct for the mistakes of the previous villains. Of course, this just means that the Bond Villain Stupidity shifts over to Erik Gunter instead.
  • Scorpia Rising: Is Alex going to have a relationship with Sabina, or would he not have a relationship with basically his adopted sister?
    • That's one of those "You'll never know, but don't think about it too hard" questions.
    • She's only his adopted sister from age fifteen onwards, and they had a bit of a romance before that. It's not like they've grown up as siblings, so I can't think of any reason that this would be a problem.
      • What's more, Horowitz was careful with his wording. never was the word "adopted" used, just the term "legally responsible" to paraphrase.
      • Page 428 of the UK edition: "It was almost as if he had been adopted."
      • This question might very well be the reason why Sabina and her family are completely absent from Never Say Die, assuming that book is canon - for all we know, Secret Weapon could address this issue (assuming that the Pleasure family appear.
  • Why is Alex shooting Julius Grief treated as the first time he's killed someone in cold blood? Dr Grief is debatable, but there's all the people he kills in the car chase in Eagle Strike or the guard he throws onto a bed of lethally poisonous plants in Crocodile Tears, and nobody even mentions the fact that just minutes before killing Julius he tricked a man into being fatally stung by a scorpion, broke his nose and left him for dead.
    • This annoys me too. I suppose before he's always been able to reason his way around it somehow, like he didn't know for sure they would die, or it was an absolute last resort (how true that would be is debatable).
    • I think it may be because it was the first time Alex killed someone while he had the upper hand instead of just in the heat of the moment. He actually had time to deliberate over it
    • IN. COLD. BLOOD. That's the key phrase there. There's a huge difference between killing people in a desperate chase or heat of the moment and killing someone in cold blood.
      • But at the moment he shot Julius, Julius was going for the gun on the ground and Alex knew he was. Until the point where Julius dived for the gun, Alex was walking away.
    • There's also how he deals with Dr. Grief in Point Blanc. Ramping a snowmobile off a ski-jump to take down a helicopter takes some serious forethought. That sounds pretty cold-blooded to me.
      • I think it's also the whole "killing someone who looks just like you" bit. That would mess up a normal person, let alone someone who'd been through a Trauma Conga Line like Alex. Plus most of the deaths were from a distance/he didn't watch the other person die-this is up close and personal.
  • With regards to Razim's death - can salt really do that to a person?
    • Yes. This is a great way to cook fish. And apparently terrorists.
  • Here's one, Horowitz meant for the reader not to think that Alex died at the end of Scorpia, because the weapon used was not suited for assassination attempts. Why the hell would the expert criminal organization SCORPIA, which gets the "A" part of their name from "assassination" knowingly make a mistake that interferes with one of their core functions? All I can think of is that Horowitz was either too proud of his little ruse to notice that crucial detail, or it was just Plot Induced Stupidity brought on by a lazy writer.
    • I'd always assumed that this was, in-story, meant to be an error on the part of the assassin. Reading back the last chapter of Scorpia, it's stated that he chose the gun himself because it was light and very compact, so he could get it across London without attracting suspicion. It even notes it's "less deadly than some he might have chosen".
    • Another thing involving this: It's stated that the bullet bounced off his ribs, which is why he didn't die. Is that actually possible?
      • I think it is. Granted, I know very little about the weapons involved, but it is definitely true that bones are really dense and if you get shot directly in a rib it can stop a bullet.
    • The acknowledgements section mentions a doctor who helped Horowitz with the explanation of how Alex survived, so I guess he did his research.
  • At the end of "Scorpia", Alex is shot with a .22 round, fired from a sniper rifle. That's all fine, but why .22? I accept that Anthony Horowitz may not know a great deal about firearms, but this really bugs me. A .22 is a tiny target rifle round. The only way to kill someone with it would be a point-blank shot to the heart or temple. And it's not like the Scorpia agent used a legal round to avoid detection, as Scorpia is stated to have serious firepower at their disposal, as well as the fact the weapon was concealed, which wouldn't look very good if he was caught. Why doesn't Scorpia use a high-powered rifle with a larger round, fitted with suppressors and sub-sonic ammunition?
    • According to Word of God, the reasoning for this was that Horowitz wanted to leave a clue that Alex wouldn't be killed as a result of being shot.
      • There's also the fact that if Scorpia used a high-powered rifle, assuming that Alex did die, it would be kind of a dead giveaway that they were involved, since in the U.K., they are a lot stricter about gun regulations than in the U.S. If Alex was shot using a high-powered round, an autopsy would kind of make it a dead giveaway; using a .22 round might make it plausible that it was just someone who was crazy and just so happened to choose Alex as his target.
  • Why do the books make reference to dollars as currency in situations where references to pounds would be more appropriate?
    • Could be that you're reading the US edition, which Americafied a lot of things. I know the figure of Michael Owens in Eagle Strike was changed to Tiger Woods, and in one book(could have been the first?) miles was used instead of kilometres. Even in areas where they were in America, or the CIA was involved, things got awkward.
    • Shakespeare has actually used dollars to refer to money; plus, there were points in UK history where it was slang for some kind of money.
  • Ark Angel: So you're The Dragon, and your Big Bad boss wants you to pose as an eco-terrorist so crazy he's tattooed his face to look like the Earth. You'll also have a Mission Impossible-type mask so you won't have to look like that all the time. Do you a) leave your real face normal and put the tattoos on the mask, or b) tattoo your own goddamn face to look like the planet Earth and use the mask to look vaguely normal? Clearly, b) is the way to go!
    • There is a post earlier with the same question. It is a combination of Rule of Cool and a running theme of how over-the-top the villains are.
  • In Scorpia Rising, Mrs Jones says at the end that two of the things that alerted her to the fact that it was Blunt, not Scorpia, who arranged for the sniper at Brookland were that the sniper didn't hit Alex, but said "mission accomplished", and secondly that the sniper seemed to deliberately miss. Given that Scorpia's plan was not to kill Alex, and indeed their plan hinged on getting Alex to Cairo, which the sniper attempt proved the catalyst for, why should this indicate that it was not Scorpia who was responsible?
    • None of the interrogated Scorpia members knew about the sniper. Which would be kind of strange if it were an integral part of their plan.
    • True, but the way Mrs Jones phrases it makes it sound like the assassination attempt should have been successful, which is confusing as nobody wanted Alex dead at that point.
    • Scorpia's latest scheme hinged on Blunt coercing Alex to work for MI6 again, one way or another.
  • In Stormbreaker, Sayle holds a contest for a kid to try out the new computer. What was the point of this is the whole point of the Stormbreaker was to kill people?
    • It's a Publicity Stunt.
    • The Stormbreaker at Sayle's base didn't unleash the deadly smallpox gas anyway.
    • It was a show of good faith, like everything else Sayle did. He took in a random kid who won a contest, he played pool with him and, after losing, agreed to pay up however much he owed (although reluctantly), he served him fine food... it was all to create the image of Herod Sayle was a kind, generous, friendly and beneficial man. The only time the facade slipped was when he got angry, which happened easily
  • In-Universe with Alex rightfully pointing out that while MI-6 doesn't want to give a kid a gun they're completely fine with sending him to his death.
    • Alex himself exercises this on occasion, seeming to think that unless he does it with a gun or some other obvious implement of murder, none of the people killed as a result of his actions, occasionally deliberately (see Dr. Grief) and often directly, seem to count as far as he is concerned. This has the rather dubious result of Alex racking up an impressive body count over the course of the series and yet still seeming to think that he's not a killer.
    • This is in all probability the only thing keeping the kid sane by this point, so you can't really blame the poor sod.
    • Mrs. Rothman points this out in Scorpia, while trying to convince Alex to work for her organisation.
    • Actually, most of the deaths are of the types where Alex can't see them. Not mentally but physically so he can delude himself into thinking they survived or it was not his fault.
  • In Ark Angel, the entire Evil Plan hinges on the Big Bad using his space hotel which has gone over the budget and would have gone down in history as a financial failure as an improvised meteor on the Pentagon, destroying all evidence on him along with the everyone involved in getting it. The series was supposed to take place around year 2000 while taking place over the next two years due to the first book being published on 2000. Why would the CIA have no other backups or extra copies of their evidence stored in other places like their HQ in Langley despite its importance? Even if it is 2000/2001 and they couldn't exactly use modern backup techniques like saving to external disk drives, you would think they have copies made whenever new evidence arrives and have them be kept in secret in other places. Imagine if his plan actually succeeded. The USA is in chaos with the destruction of Washington and he is celebrating getting scot-free...only for the Barbados CIA branch to clamp down on his ass. On that topic, why isn't the Big Bad worried about any possible backups kept in other places as well?
    • Putting aside the fact that he, like most of the baddies, aren't exactly the sharpest crayons in the box, it's possible he felt that the CIA would be in enough of a tatters thanks to his Colony Drop that by the time they got their act back together, he could have already gone underground and come up with a different alias.
    • Also the Alex Rider series actually follows Comic-Book Time, so the books are set when they come out even if the gap between them is shorter in-universe.
  • Why does Alexei Sarov want to rebuild the Berlin Wall? If his eventual goal is to Take Over the World and make Communism the ideology of every country, he'd eventually control both halves of Berlin and the wall would have no reason to exist.

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