Headscratchers / Incredibles 2

Discrepencies between films

• How come at the end of The Incredibles, When the Underminer shows up, The Parr family don their masks but are still in their civilian clothes (minus Jack-Jack), though Bob is about to take off his shirt. At the beginning of Incredibles 2, in the flashback from Tony Rydinger's point of view, as soon as The Underminer appears, they appear in their super suits and Jack-Jack is in his stroller. Also the Underminer leaves out these quotes from the end of the first movie: "I hereby declare war on peace and happiness!" and "Soon all will tremble before me!" How were they able to change into their super suits and get Jack-Jack's stroller so fast, despite being in their normal clothes and there being no stroller in the scene at the end of the first one? Was it a mistake?
  • While the stroller is possibly a continuity error (unless the Incredibles swiped it from somewhere really quick), the Underminer may very well have delivered the whole speech just like in the original movie; the story being told from Tony Rydinger's point of view as he's cowering under a car, he probably just didn't hear the last part about that supposed war on peace and happiness (which, if you listen is in there; Tony's voice-over just covers up most of it). (Notably, the Underminer proceeds to rob a bank immediately thereafter instead of concentrating on destroying the city, which suggests his speech about a supposed "war" was nothing more than a bit of flim-flammery to throw people off about his real motives.) Also, Tony first catches sight of the Incredibles right after they've stripped off their civvies and are getting into the action.
  • On re-watching those scenes and further analysis, the previous movie may actually have been an In-Universe Re-enactment. See the Wild Mass Guesses page for details. In that first movie, Helen was carrying Jack-Jack on her back in a plastic carrier thing with straps, whereas in this movie the stroller looks something like that carrier, but inverted with a slightly different color of plastic and in a frame with wheels attached. Also, in the first movie, the Underminer was just wrapping up his speech when the Incredibles started changing their clothes, whereas here they're changed and all ready to go by the time he gets to the part about declaring war on peace and happiness. These discrepancies are probably due to a little In-Universe Artistic License, i.e. the re-enactment was generally an accurate portrayal on the whole of what happened, but wasn't so precise concerning these relatively minor details.
  • Alternatively, I might point out that the Incredibles had to have stashed their civilian clothes somewhere in a hurry, that their family speedster Dash is just the kid for the job, and that he might very well have been able to dash off to the family's car, stash their civvies in it, and get out the stroller frame to use with that carrier all in two seconds flat. Only the discrepancies in the timing of the Underminer's speech and the color of the plastic carrier need be attributed to the Literary Agent Hypothesis concerning the previous movie.

Safe Room False Dilemma

• The Deavor siblings are both motivated from the same event: shortly after superheroes are banned, two burglars enter their home. The dad tries to call the supers while the mom hides in the safe room. The heroes don't come, dad is shot, and mom dies months after in grief. This is a serviceable backstory until I realized why not have the direct phone lines to the supers in the safe room? The choice between "call the supers" and "get to the safe room" is just as forced and arbitrary as "call the police" and "get to the safe room" is in real life.
  • Their father was stated to show them off any time guests were over, so he had them installed in the open just so they could be shown off, neglecting the obvious choice to place them.
  • Obviously he should have installed two sets of lines. One in the open where he could show them off, and one in the safe room. Plus maybe a regular phone line in the safe room so he could call the police too.
  • Be this as noted, he had that phone installed when the Supers weren't outlawed, thus, the Supers being legal would have deterred any potential run-of-the-mill crook from doing anything, in which case, they were installed in the open because no one had much a reason to suspect that your standard perps would just break in, so they never really planned for such events. When word got out that the Supers were outlawed, well, we got what we got.
  • I think the event was set up to show that Evelyn did have something of a point in her goals, while also demonstrating that it was just a single unfortunate situation that she was blowing way out of proportion. By not thinking to put the phones in the safe room, and resorting to using them when it was impossible for the supers to have saved him in time anyway, Mr. Deavor did put too much of his faith in them, and it ended up costing him his life. But that doesn't mean the rest of humanity is nearly so foolish as to attempt something like that, especially when they've had to make do without supers for the past 15 years.
  • It's possible that they didn't bother constructing a safe room until after superheroes were banned, and they hadn't yet thought to rewire the direct lines to go inside of it.

Jack-Jack's powers

• How did the family not know about Jack-Jack’s powers? He got them at the end of the first movie while the family watched? Plus Kari told Dicker about Jack-Jack’s powers. Surely he would have told them that their son now has superpowers?
  • He was too far away for them to see exactly what was going on. All they really saw was that, for some reason, Syndrome dropped the baby. As for Dicker, he wasn't working closely with the heroes at the time and not seeing them every day; perhaps it just never came up, or slipped his mind. It's even possible that Jack-Jack Attack hasn't even happened yet, and only takes place when Jack-Jack's emerging powers remind the Incredibles of all those weird voicemail messages Kari left, and they point Rick at her then.
    • Jack-Jack Attack happened while the family was on the island and while they were fighting in Metroville up until Syndrome kidnaps Jack-Jack so Jack-Jack already got his powers before the second movie. While your other explanations are plausible though the Dicker one is stretching it, Kari has called Mrs. Parr telling her about how weird stuff was happening to Jack-Jack. Surely, that should have clued them in?
    • They meant the sequences in JJA where Rick is interrogating Kari happened after the movie, not before. And as for Kari's voicemail messages, Helen didn't have time to think them over because they immediately had to rush home and save Jack-Jack from Syndrome. So it is entirely plausible that none of that came up until the family realized Jack-Jack had powers and said, "Wait, is this why that babysitter was freaking out over it? Crap, we had better call Rick about her." There was also no opportunity to listen to the messages again due to house going up in flames.
    • There's a Deleted Scene where the Parr's go to Kari's house to try and find out what these messages are about. Since the events of JJA, Kari has been acting "hysterical" and "twitchy", possibly because Amnesia Missed a Spot, but she says she only remembers showing Jack-Jack flashcards.
• At the end of the first movie, we're told that Dash’s track meet happens after a three-month Time Skip after the climactic fight with Syndrome. On top of that, the Parrs have been living in tiny motel for those three months since their house burned down. All that time alone in a cramped motel suite, and NOBODY noticed anything was different about Jack-Jack?
  • They weren't in a hotel for three months. The Agency was still active at the time, so they could just put them in another house. It's only the Underminer incident, which coincided with The Agency getting defunded, that put them in a hotel.
  • In Jack-Jack Attack, Jack-Jack's powers only surfaced while he was listening to Mozart. And at the end of the first film, he proceeded to only use them out of stress to escape from Syndrome. So it probably took a while for him to become intelligent enough to experiment with his powers more.
  • Dicker didn't tell the Parrs about Jack-Jack since he assumed they already knew. The voice messages did not confirm Jack-Jack was using his powers and Helen assumed Kari could not take care of a normal baby having a tantrum.
• Having just rewatched the original ending, I think I have an explanation. I concur that Jack-Jack was too far from the rest of the family for them to see what was happening. As for Kari's messages, Helen was concerned that something weird was happening, but then the last message had her suddenly cheery and thanking them for getting a "replacement sitter" (Syndrome). They probably called Dicker on her for handing over the baby to a supervillain and to find out what was happening, but because he has gotten apathetic in his work, he didn't tell them about Jack-Jack's powers.

Superheroes are still illegal, aren't they?

• This is sort of a meta-plot hole in the series overall but for all the talk of superheroing being illegal nobody ever really gets punished for it: apparently no charges were brought upon the family and they were just free to walk. This really weirds me out: in something like DC or Marvel if superheroes were made illegal they'd send whole teams of power-neutralizing goons backed by pro-government heroes to take you down and put you in specialized prisons, but the most anyone gets is a slap on the wrist. In fact, when Estatigirl saves the maglev train she gets a talk show interview even though she's technically a criminal!
  • I think it's because with the sudden defunding and shut down of the super relocation program, those that made the laws did not take into account that heroes can go rogue and didn't think that prisons would be needed. Like Dicker said, the politicians didn't understand the importance of the program, and if DEVTECH didn't step in with its plan to bring supers back into the good graces of society, it could have been a matter of weeks before supers started to go 'rogue' and with no SRP to compress incidents and relocate, superheroes would have been out in the open again, with mixed results. There is the possibility that left unchecked, the government might have started to fund a 'capture and depower' program instead.
  • It might also be that the NSA supers had a rock-solid respect for the law and government orders (which they would sort of have to have, just for the sake of being able to work with under government supervision at all). So when they were outlawed, they all hung up their capes and assimilated like good little boys and girls. Even Bob and Lucius limit their super-activity to small-time police scanner crimefighting.
  • Well, weren't super heroes banned in the first place because the government found it too expensive to repair all the damage they cause and the whole bring sued and all? So it's probably one of those crimes like jaywalking where officially it's not allowed, but the general public doesn't care.
• Also Winston Deavor is basically aiding and abetting crimes: only Dash brings this up and this isn't even brushed off with the "Oh they're rich they can get away with it" handwave that Violet uses towards the end for someone else.
  • It may have to do with them operating in a new city than normal (where Winston is on good terms with the police chief). It's stated to have the highest crime rate to begin with, and Elastigirl takes as much measure as possible to avoid damage. In the end she scuffs a car, breaks a few windows, and then blows up her own motorcycle. Bob likely would have just torn the track apart.
  • And the success with the train would have been incredibly helpful. From memory, I believe that Winston had been planning this long in advance and just needed a few public displays of supers being needed and useful to convince a majority to make supers legal again- I find it very weird for Winston and Evelyn to be able to round up all those new supers and the entire world convinced to bring back supers in what feels like less then a week, so they had to have that all ready in advance, in the works to have it ready.
  • Winston explicitly says he has a Friend on the Force in the form of the city's chief of police and cleared this with him first. Given he has a crime ridden city and a good friend in a wealthy pro-Super activist, we can assume said chief of police is happy to have a Super around and told everyone to look the other way or even technically 'deputized' Helen to make her legal in a way. It's not impossible that the majority of cops like having Supers around because it makes things safer for them and the people they mutually protect (Mr. Incredible is shown to be on good terms with the cops back when he was an active Super) and at least some of them look the other way when they can do so because they agree with Winston that it's unfair.
    • You'd think that the city's police would get in trouble for blatantly not enforcing the law. This stuff is happening in broad daylight! And if the mayor and whoever else is actually fine with it and it's just one of those laws that never gets enforced...well then you'd think that other superheroes would start coming out of the woodwork. Why bother obeying the law if it's never gonna get enforced anyway?
• Just because laws are on the books doesn't mean they're always enforced.
  • The Parrs were probably let go largely because of the goodwill left over from their stopping Syndrome. It was recent enough that the cops/DA probably didn't want to look like schmucks, especially given that they did stop the mole machine in the end, and saved a bunch of lives along the way.
  • Winston Deavor was probably able to get around the laws for, ironically, the very same reason Violet complains in the end that Deavor's sister will probably just get a slap on the wrist for her supervillainy: he's rich and powerful, with powerful friends.
  • Even then, it was just the fact that Evelyn was pulling strings to set up a handy straw man for Elastigirl to knock down to get superheroes right where she wanted them that was really responsible for the turnaround happening before law enforcement even had time to get involved. There was a big supervillain for Elastigirl to defeat, a renowned ambassador for her to save, and suddenly a treaty signing to reverse the illegality of superheroes, all before law enforcement even had time to get going on it—especially since the last remnants of the NSA, the bureau originally responsible for regulating superheroic activity, had just been shut down.

I guess Syndrome only killed American supers?

• The impression I had at the end of the first movie was that the superhero community was seriously diminished: obviously government agents like Dicker handle more clients than just the Parr family and there wouldn't be a whole National Supers Agency just to monitor six people (the Parrs and Frozone), but Syndrome had killed a couple dozen supers and was confident no one else would (or could) crash his party and defeat his robot when it was rampaging around Metroville. However, here we get to see a whole troop of foreign superheroes who apparently escaped the super-genocide unscathed. Maybe Syndrome's plot was more limited than the first film would have us believe.
  • It's been 14 years since then and as shown by the rookies Winston brings in, people still have been born with superpowers. These supers likely haven't been operating in public and came out for the first time once the movement started.
    • It hasn't been 14 years in-universe. This movie picks up where the end-scene of the previous movie stopped. The heroes we see are either ones who weren't powerful enough for Syndrome to worry about, or in some cases were from other countries.
    • But it has been (at least) 14 years in-universe since Supers were compelled to go underground. As to why Syndrome hasn't seemed to target Supers from other countries, it seems to me that the publicity frenzy and idolisation of Supers back in the day was largely an American phenomenon. After all, having such a publicly-visible superhero persona is going to make keeping the identity of your secret identity secret a problem, which is why the NSA had a relocation/mindwiping programme during the glory days (as implied by Bob's line about the number of people Dicker had to mindwipe after discovering his or Helen's secret identities). Which country is the only one rich enough to be able to afford to fund a programme that could potentially cost millions a month? The same one that is rich enough to operate more than two full-sized aircraft carrier task groups simultaneously. Hence, Supers in countries without such programmes keep lower profiles, decline offers of TV interviews and Time magazine feature pieces, and don't come to the attention of Syndrome.
  • That, and Syndrome was targeting supers he knew about from his childhood and played on them wanting to go back to the 'glory days' and were causing scenes that could be trackable, and knew their abilities. Anyone else didn't pop up on his radar.
  • There's nothing in the original film that implied Syndrome's goal was to wipe out every last superhero. He didn't go hunting for Elastigirl or Frozone, after all. The reason why he kept pitting his robot against supers (other than petty grudges) was to learn from his failures and construct a robot that was effectively super-proof. By the time he made his way down the list to Mr. Incredible (his childhood boy-crush), he probably felt his robot was good enough and didn't need any more improvements.
    • Slight nitpick: he was hunting Frozone, that's how he found Mr. Incredible and immediately switched targets. And Elastigirl did have a Kronos entry, they just hadn't found her yet.

Clark Kenting too far: those domino masks

• I'm not here to complain about Clark Kenting in general: I am a person who is very bad at recognizing people and has been fooled by something as simple as a pair of glasses: I recognize people by their silhouettes and glasses significantly change the profile of someone's face at least the way I see it. I'm also not here to complain about those domino masks: while I think they're a terrible disguise since they only cover a small area around your eyes I accept it as part of the universe aesthetic (i.e. domino masks are to the Incredibles' universe what capes are to DC) and can suspend my disbelief in any case. However, this time they finally acknowledged the domino masks when Violet takes hers off in front of love interest Tony and he recognizes her. I was fine as long as they never made the case for them actually working, but this scene implies that the domino mask alone leaves Tony clueless in spite of Violet not changing her voice/hairstyle/general body shape/eye color/face/etc etc.
  • He said that he noted her voice to begin with so it's likely he would have noticed if he stared for a bit longer.
  • It's also important to note that he doesn't know Violet very well, and has only talked with her once.
• On the subject of domino masks, if, like you say, they’re this universe’s equivalent of capes in DC, then why does Jack-Jack perceive a raccoon as a bad guy and not a hero? Granted he’s young, but shouldn’t he be saturated in the imagery of domino masks as a symbol of heroism? If he’s mature enough to make the "raccoon mask = domino mask = villainous" connection, he should be mature enough to associate those masks with heroes.
  • This is almost a non-issue. The film clearly shows Jack-Jack watching a vintage movie where a robber is wearing a domino mask while taking money from the cash register. Jack-Jack hears a noise and looks over to see a raccoon with domino mask fur markings taking food from the garbage. That immediate connection is what imprints on Jack-Jack and he reacts accordingly.

Stopping the boat

• When trying to stop the runaway hydrofoil, Bob pries the anchor off its chain, wraps the chain around himself, and has at trying to manually move the rudder, with the chain as his retrieval lanyard-with the difficulty that he was also avoiding a high-speed propeller. While this prop would have spelled an underwater Helicopter Blender death for a normal man, this is Mr. Incredible. Why not stop the boat by smashing the propeller with the anchor chain?
  • It takes less distance to change the direction of a moving object than to bring it to a stop, especially when the only option for stopping the moving object is letting it expend its momentum naturally. Destroying the propellers would also prevent the boat from being able to reverse, making it take longer for the ship to slow to a stop. These were contributing factors in the sinking of the Titanic.
• My question is, why did Bob just give up trying to reach the control room after Krushhauser blocked his way? Couldn't he have just used his super strength to push his way through?
  • Why didn't they get Void to open a portal (not that she wasn't vital where she was) or just go around the obstacle by going up or down a floor and then using en other entrance down.
    • A yacht isn't a cruise ship. That might actually be the only real entrance.
  • Tearing through bulkheads and decks, already weakened by Krushhauser's powers on a hydrofoil moving at full speed, is a good way to crack the ship in two and drown everybody still hypnotized in the conference room.
  • The reason Bob gives up on reaching the engine room is given as "there isn't enough time." Even if he did find a way in and shut down the engine, the boat wouldn't be able to come to stop in time to avoid a collision.

Elastigirl can breathe in the stratosphere!

• In the climax, Evelyn almost manages to take down Elastigirl by decompressing the jet, causing her to start succumbing to hypoxia. However, in the first movie, we see her holding together the rocket's delivery module mid-air without suffering any ill effects, under what seems like much more extreme conditions. Why the sudden vulnerability?
  • She was taken off guard when Evelyn does it. It's possible she took a deep breath with her Rubber Man powers in the former. Also, it's likely the jet was going much higher than the delivery module was, as Evelyn went into a steep climb.
    • It is in fact certain that the delivery rocket was a lot lower when Elastigirl would have to be breathing unprotected. As presented in the first movie the delivery system acts like an ICBM right up until it comes within line of sight of the city at which point the outer layer breaks away to form a glider instead. Based on the height compared to the buildings of the city and the drop off to the freeway this would place it firmly in the Troposphere where humans can breath unassisted.
  • It's possible she was faking the hypoxia or at least how affected she was. She seemed very lucid right after.
  • It's very brief, but Helen grabs one of the overhead oxygen masks and takes a big breath as she sits down to take the wheel.

The bigger problem with Screenslaver

• When the pizza delivery guy was arrested, everyone was understandably real excited because they thought Screenslaver was no more. But shouldn't people still be worried? From what they've just seen, they now know that a bunch of flashing patterns on a screen is all it takes to completely take over someone's mind. Is it really time to celebrate yet? Why aren't the world's scientists working on a way to protect people from that glaring weakness? As an analogy, it's like there's this hacker who manages to spread a virus all over the world using a huge zero-day vulnerability that affects every computer. The hacker is eventually caught and arrested, and antivirus software is updated to neutralize the virus, but no one's working on patching the vulnerability that enabled the virus to spread in the first place. Isn't this a problem?
  • The problem isn't "Humans have a weakness for flashing screens," it was "This guy's technology can hypnotize people." So they catch that guy, the one guy with that tech, and as far as they're concerned, problem solved.
  • It's a problem, but it's not the heroes' problem. Helen isn't a super scientist. She catches the bad guy, who then becomes the responsibility of the system. Figuring out how he did what he did and how to keep it from happening again would probably be the job of the NSA, or whichever branch inherited that responsibility from them.

Why couldn't the kids go to Edna's?

• If I recall, when the kids use the Incredibile to escape from the brainwashed heroes, Violet says they can't go to Edna's. But why? I mean, even if Edna couldn't directly help, surely she could have added modifications to their suits or provided gadgets that could have been helpful. She's a family friend and she clearly has state of the art tech at her disposal, so why not at least regroup with her?
  • I think the kids thought Edna might've been hypnotized as well.
  • Also, Violet was focused on the clue of Bob saying "the DEVTECH boat" right before he left, and was more concerned about getting to the bottom of that.
  • Frozone knows about Edna's. They might intercept the Parr kids before they get there.
  • Maybe they were afraid of leading the hypnotized supers to Edna, since that would risk Screenslaver getting her hands on Edna's brilliant mind and impressive technology if they managed to capture her like they already did to Frozone. (Not that Screenslaver needs all that technology, but the kids don't know that.)

Wasn't it Saturday?

• Violet sets up her date with Tony for Friday. Bob struggles with Dash's math homework while Violet is ostensibly on her date with Tony, stays up late learning the New Math, and then wakes Dash up early to go over it before he leaves for school . . . on Saturday? What?
  • Yes, it was. Unusual as it may seem, American schools that have had snow days occasionally do have make-up days on Saturday. While we don't know how closely the Incredibles' version of America resembles ours, it's entirely possible they were having one of those make-up days at Dash and Violet's schools for three potential reasons: 1) inclement weather, just like in our school systems (quite possibly an even more common occurrence in their world, since weather control powers and technology are regular features of worlds with supers in them) or 2) the disruption to the city caused by Syndrome's Omnidroid making its attack in the first movie; considering that the city had measures in place to insure against super-villain attacks like the Underminer's, the local school system might well have some kind of policy of evacuating the schools and sending the kids home (or keeping them there) for the day when there's a property-wrecking battle taking place in the city; or 3) the aforementioned Underminer's property-wrecking attack earlier that very same week, triggering the same policy.
  • Maybe Bob devoted the entire weekend to understanding Dash's math homework, then woke him up early Monday morning so that he could finish it. Or it was Saturday, but after finishing the homework, Dash just went back to bed. I don't think the film outright says that the day Vi confronts Tony at school was the same day Bob helped Dash finish his homework.

Just close your eyes, dammit

• Why didn't Elastigirl just close her eyes when the hypno-goggles got slapped on her? She was shown earlier in the film being Genre Savvy enough to not look at the hypno-monitors (during the news broadcast) so why didn't she think to do it this time? It makes sense that Mr. Incredible and Frozone wouldn't (because they didn't know how it worked) but Elastigirl should've.
  • Evelyn probably modified the goggles to immediately brainwash a person's mind after she realized that Elastigirl knew how to counteract the hypnosis.
  • It's also a lot harder to ignore a flashing light when it's about a centimeter away from your eyes.
  • It may even work through closed eyes when it's that intense. You can still see a flashing light through closed eyes.
  • Brad Bird addressed this issue saying that one thing Evelyn built into the hypnotic pattern was a subliminal command to "not close your eyes". The previous times, Helen had the benefit of holding her hand over eyes which wasn't possible while she was being held in the freeze tank.

Why wasn't all of Bob's memorabilia destroyed?

• Syndrome's plane crashed down on the Parrs' house at the end of the first movie, yet Bob is seen unpacking a number of boxes of memorabilia midway through the second movie. I can understand his old supersuit being indestructible, but . . . everything from his office?
  • Well, it makes sense that at least some of their possessions would have survived the explosion, it's not like their house was completely vaporized. Bob probably went through the wreckage of the house and stowed away anything they could recover. He also kept some of that memorabilia inside of frames and glass cases, which increases their chance of being protected from the blast.
  • He probably moved a bunch of his stuff to storage after Mirage's message exploded and set off the house sprinklers.
  • That room contained evidence of Bob's (and presumably Elastigirl's) past lives as heroes. It stands to reason it would be the best-protected room in the entire house, like a vault, perhaps even with armor plating built into the walls, just because they wouldn't want to chance some home visitor (or burglar) accidentally stumbling on it. Being an interior windowless room, it probably served as the family's tornado shelter at need as well.
  • There's also the fact that the room was in the basement, which provides a solid layer of protection in of itself.

The family gets arrested now?

• Okay, so after the battle with the Underminer, the feds come in and give Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl a major What the Hell, Hero? speech about how the banks were insured and thus the damages and stolen money would have been covered without further damaged caused by the heroes, which we see the news reports play up on. Fair enough, I get at this point Supers are still illegal. But when Underminer first appeared at the end of the last film, he proceeds to give a grandiose speech saying he was DECLARING WAR and how they would all tremble before him. This gives off a heavy implication that he was gonna do a hella alot more than just rob a bank. Hell even when he is just drilling he's sending cars and debris everywhere which almost hits Violet's crush, Tony. So yeah the Parrs and Lucius may have broken the law, but they did the same thing when they took out the Omnidroid that gave a Curb-Stomp Battle to the police and military. People were cheering and it doesn't seem like the family was arrested. Now they try to stop a mole guy with a Weapon of Mass Destruction as his personal ride who comes off as an Omnicidal Maniac, and the NSA is shut down right after?
  • Yes. Indeed everything you saw on screen did happen. If you're asking why, from an out-of-universe perspective, Pixar did not foresee a sequel happening and when it happened, a few things had to be retconned or simply worked around and the Underminer's reason for popping out of the ground like that had to be elaborated upon. In-universe, just because people cheer for the protagonists does not mean what they were doing was legal, skewed priorities or no (although swaying public opinion to change the law is what this film is about). Sure, the Incredibles and Frozone saved the city from the nigh-indestructible Omnidroid, but once the police had a reason to arrest them for doing more harm than good, they did. Also, despite his spiel, the Underminer DID just break into a bank, and once he was done, he just left, so he didn't exactly follow through.
  • One thing to note here: the Omnidroid did curbstomp the military and the police. They threw everything they had at it and it wasn't even scratched. The only thing they had left to try were WMDs, which for obvious reasons they wouldn't want to At that point, I think even the most hardcore anti-Super politician would have no choice but to realize the Godzilla Threshold had been crossed and say "Let them fight" when the Supers showed up to fight it. And also note, at the time no one knew Syndrome had made the Omnidroid, as far as they knew (and as Syndrome had intended for them to believe) it was the vanguard of an Alien Invasion. Winston points out that the politicians don't get the Supers and will twist anything they can to incriminate them. The Omnidroid was an exception as it'd humiliated the military and the police, so there's no real way to twist that against the Supers.

Why is the family broke at the start of the film?

• So, at the start of the film, the Parrs are seemingly broke, and facing homelessness once their NSA-sponsored motel stay is over, unless Bob or Helen gets a job. But why are they in such dire straits? Remember, in the first film, Bob was paid '3 times his annual salary' by Mirage for fighting the first Omnidroid. Now while he did spend some of that money, buying his snazzy new sports car and the second car for Helen, surely he didn't blow through all of that money?
  • If he bought the cars outright, possibly. It's also probable he didn't get it all in one lump sum — that he was receiving the pay in installments, which then got cut off when the government froze Syndrome's accounts.
  • It's also possible that any remaining money could have been confiscated legally, given that it was technically payment for breaking the law.
    • How was what Bob was doing on the island breaking the law? He was hired to take down a robot that was built and owned by the people who hired him. That seems different than listening in on the police scanner so you can partake in vigilantism.
  • No-one apart from the family and Mirage actually knows what what happened on the island. The city fight though, yeah, he's getting arrested for that.
  • They weren't entirely broke since Bob hadn't been working for at least five months. He probably still had something left for them to eat and stuff. But supporting all five of them is expensive so probably went through it.
  • The Government had to pay out a significant sum to Insuricare after Bob sent his boss through the wall. It wouldn't be surprising if they garnished some of his newfound wealth once they learned about it. Further, it's entirely possible some (if not all) of his payment came in cash and burned up with the house.

Why not remain behind the curtain?

• Why didn't Evelyn brainwash another guy into being the real Screenslaver instead of slapping the goggles on Elastigirl, taking the risk of exposing yourself? I don't think Helen would have figured out it was her.
  • Probably for the same reason that she wakes Helen up just to tell her the evil plan. Evelyn apparently likes an audience.
  • Also, I don't think Evelyn meant to reveal herself at that point. She saw that Helen had left the party, followed her to check on her, and then before she could divert her Helen spotted the feed from her suit camera in the background and had her epiphany. At that point, Evelyn had to improvise.
  • Yup, Helen had just pieced the last pieces together. Her next move would have been to realize Evelyn was the one behind it all and to go after her. Getting the glasses on Helen would have been a lot more difficult when she would have expected them.

Why not free the brainwashed supers earlier?

• After fighting the brainwashed supers at their house, Violet and Dash know about the brainwashing glasses. Once they're on the boat, Violet is forced to fight Voyd and manages to knock her unconscious before running off. Later, Jack-Jack manages to incapacitate Voyd and two other supers again with Violet and Dash. Yet, they never try to remove the glasses to stop the brainwashing until they free their parents. I understand from a story perspective why they wouldn't, but is there an in-universe one? Hell, Dash probably could have freed all of them near-instantly.
  • Dash and Violet knew they were in way over their heads. They were probably hoping that their parents would know what to do better than they would, and made saving them their primary goal, leaving the brainwashed supers for later.
  • Violet and Dash are also inexperienced. They didn't realize that taking the goggles off of Voyd after beating her would be a good idea.
  • Not only that, but any of the unconscious supers could have been pulling a Wounded Gazelle Gambit just to ambush them and attach the mind-control goggles. Approaching them would have been way too risky.
  • If they're unconscious, it's not as though the kids would be able to carry them to safety on their own. And if they leave them lying there without goggles, the other supers will come across them and put another pair on them anyway.
  • Consider the two fights: First, Violet vs Void. After Violet won (barely might add), Void was on a lower level with no visible access back up and Violet was trying to get back to Dash and Jack-Jack. Second was the kitchen battle where Jack-Jack flattened the controlled supers. Jack-Jack quickly went on the move again and Dash and Violet were more concerned with trying to keep up with a quickly moving baby. Simply put, they didn't remove the glasses at the time because they had more urgent priorities.

Do villains with super powers exist in this universe?

• You ever notice the villains they fight in the first and second movie have no super powers? Underminer, Syndrome, Bomb Voyage, and Screenslaver are non-superpowerful villains who use technology, explosives, and gadgets to take on the super heroes. Are there evil supers with actual super powers in this world?
  • Sounds like a great premise for Incredibles 3.
  • The villains all have the "gadgeteer" super power - the ability to make super-science gadgets that no one else can duplicate. The Big Bad in each movie was also all smart enough to make a personal fortune using the gadgeteer super power. Edna Mode is an example of a gadgeteer who is on the good guy side.
  • Considering people with superpowers appear to be regulated by the government in this universe, maybe the government keeps them in check by developing countermeasures against the powers of each one — like some super-strong shackles to contain someone like Bob, a hyper-chilled cell for Helen, a hot, dry room for Frozone — so they can be subdued safely in the event that one of them tries going evil. So the only people with the wiggle-room to actually become villains are the normies who aren't constantly being monitored by the authorities.
  • Depending how you look at it Syndrome and Screenslaver might have super powers, specifically super intelligence, that aren't being regulated due to being unrecognized.
  • Its also very firmly implied the answer is yes. Gamma Jack, one of the heroes Syndrome killed off, is noted in supplemental material to have been under government observation before the ban on Superheroes was put in place. The combination of an extreme ego, the nature of his powers, and his open opinion that supers were better then normal people had the govenrment worried he'd turn villain on them.

Could the Screenslaver control Jack-Jack?

• In the scene after the New Heroes get Frozone, it is demonstrated that Evelyn favors issuing an order and giving her puppets free reign to obey that order. Jack-Jack seems to be unable to control his powers himself, and beyond that, one of his powers is eyes shooting lasers. Could she get Jack-Jack goggled and under control?
  • I would guess not, since Jack-Jack seems a bit too young to be able to follow complex orders from anyone, whether he's hypnotized or not. Unless the goggles somehow improve his brain functionality, it probably wouldn't do Evelyn any good to slap a pair on him.
  • Given Jack-Jack only marginally understands English the most she could probably do is keep him docile. Within his limited vocabulary there simply aren't the words for anything more complex than that and it's clear her puppets need to understand in order to comply.
  • Babies' visual sense also takes time to develop, being the one sense they can't practice using until after birth. Depending on how old Jack-Jack is, his brain's visual centers may still be puzzling out how things like patterns and perspective work, so Screenslaver's mechanisms may not be able to exploit those pattern-recognition neurons that make older humans vulnerable to hypnosis.

Where had the family been living prior to the track meet?

• In The Incredibles, the track meet is implied to have happened some unspecified amount of time after the return from the island. Presumably, the Parrs had to be living somewhere during that period. Yet after the Underminer thing, suddenly they're homeless in a hotel?
  • The Program had been providing for them up to that point with either a hotel or a temporary home. The superhero relocation program got shutdown right after the events of the Underminer invasion meaning with no more money Dicker found the cheapest reasonably nice place he could afford and paid out the rent for a few weeks.
  • I think they were living in the same motel the whole time, actually. Dicker specifically says "Two more weeks in here is the best I can do," and Violet later asks "How much longer in the motel?" Both of these seem like odd things to say if that was their first night there.

The Goggles do...Something

• Can the hypnotized supers still see through Evelyn goggles? The goggles seem to work by putting a hypnotic pattern in front of their subject's eyes, but in all of their fights the hypnotized supers continue to act as if they can see through the goggles just fine. In fact, it would be pretty hard for them to react fast enough in a fight if they had to wait for Evelyn to tell them what to do from the camera feeds, and we see several different hypnotized supers reacting to different events at the same time. So if they can see just fine, how are they still hypnotized?
  • Semi-Transparent screens are a thing. Have the pattern flashing at about 75% opacity and leave the glasses otherwise see through so they still see the pattern but can see and react to the rest of the world as well.
  • I think it's pretty obvious they can see through the goggles. They obviously react to things they see, and having blind henchmen would be pretty useless.
  • So if they can see just fine through the goggles then they're not just looking at a hypnotic pattern, right? So how do they stay hypnotized?
    • The hypnotic pattern may be flashing all over their peripheral vision, while leaving enough of a visual field in the middle to see clearly.
    • The newscaster was able to read the Screenslaver's teleprompter script from the monitor with the hypnotic pattern, so it must have some way of conveying information via the pattern itself. Perhaps it's like one of those "magic eye" puzzles where a picture is hidden within a random pattern.
    • One way would be to have a transparency setting on the goggles, allowing the puppet to see past the hypnotic pattern while still being affected by it.
  • Not sure if this means anything, but a brief shot of Bob's and Lucius's goggles before Helen smashes them shows that the insides are all glowy-brighty-blue, just like they appear on the outside. No transparency, no hypnotic pattern. Yeah, they probably just didn't want to animate them that way when they were only onscreen for less than a second, but still.

Why didn't Evelyn just hypnotize the entire world into believing there were good reasons Supers should be illegal?

• Boom, one and done. She can mess with perception, she didn't need to use that power to stage an event when she could, instead, make everyone just believe it had happened.
  • Didn't the film show that people forget they'd been hypnotized once the hypnosis was over? Unless Evelyn decided to keep the entire world under hypnosis for the rest of everyone's lives (if she could even do it once - not everyone on the planet has easy access to a TV screen), this plan isn't going to achieve anything. People would spend the duration of the hypnosis thinking "Wow, superheroes are a really terrible idea!", and then once the hypnosis was over, they'd forget everything about it and resume their normal lives.
  • Also, superhero activity was still outlawed and generally frowned upon by the public. Everyone knows there are downsides to having supers around. The problem now is that Winston is trying to raise awareness of the good things they can accomplish and prove that they outweigh the bad ones - thus, her only plan was to sabotage his plan, in order to maintain the status quo.
  • Don't think there's such a thing as a global television broadcast. Plus, if she had the power to do that why would she focus on the super angle? Her suggestion would probably be more focused on personal independence and responsibility, which was ostensibly her concern in the first place.

The idea that Supers should be illegal because Supervillains appear whenever Superheroes do was proved absolutely right by both movies.

• 1.) I don't think either movie was trying to make the point that villains only exist because superheroes do, mainly because it's not true. 2.) Care to elaborate a bit? You can't just state something in the folder title and not bother explaining it or going into detail.
• Also, it isn't the fact that Supervillians appear whenever Superheroes appear, it's the destruction that follows whenever they try to save the day. This is the reason Winston chose Helen, as she has a better track record of not causing collateral damage compared to Bob.
• Screenslaver definitely was a reaction to Superheroes re-appearing in the public, but she's a manufactured villain. The Underminer, who is a "real" supervillain, seems to not care whether Superheroes exist or not.

Closed Circuit Camera.

• How in the world are the suit cameras supposed to be "closed circuit" when they are wireless - which is by definition not closed circuit?
  • It's not literally referring to a physical circuit. It means the cameras are only feeding to a specific monitor and not, for instance, being broadcast or publicly accessible.

That's quite the communication gap...

• Shouldn't Winston have known about Evelyn's feelings on supers well before his plan to help legalize them came about? She didn't have any reason to hide them - it's not like she harbored an unpopular opinion since everyone else thought supers should be outlawed already. Did the two of them never discuss their respective opinions surrounding their parents' deaths?
  • Winston while a decent person and a good salesman is an idealist. All Evelyn had to do once she'd come up with her plan was lie convincingly like she does frequently and say she'd dealt with her issues. Then claiming she agreed with him was all she would need to do.
  • She might have told him that she "realized" he was right about the superhero ban being the reason their father had gotten killed. He'd easily fall for that, since it's exactly what he'd want to hear.
• She might have played a "both are right" card where she "admits" the superhero ban had some fault but insists that he should have gone to the panic room either way. She's still insisting on that by the time they're introduced to the Parrs and Lucius.
• When they tell the story of their parents' deaths Winston does say he strongly disagrees with Evelyn's opinion that they should have just gone to the safe room, but he does it in a way that suggests that yes they have argued all of this out many times before and he doesn't want to do it again. When she brings him out of hypnosis later it doesn't take him long to realize she is the Screenslaver either. I would say that Winston was well aware that Evelyn had issues with supers but didn't realize how strong she felt about it and thought that she was willing to help his plan anyway.

The suit-camera feed in Screenslaver's lair

• Why set up a monitor showing the feed from Elastigirl's suit in (the fake) Screenslaver's lair? It doesn't even make sense to plant it a deliberate clue, since Evelyn gloatingly described her plan anyway (and must have planned that moment in advance — otherwise, she could have just kept Elastigirl's goggles on and not needed the freezer room).
  • It probably wasn't intentional, best guess she either set it up whilst she was building the fake lab (say to ensure Elastigirl was no where near) or as the tech was real, she simply moved some of her own tech into the apartment, and just forgot to disconnect the feed.
  • Given that Evelyn doesn't seem inclined to devote all her time to "piloting" her hypnotized minions' actions, she probably allowed the fake Screenslaver to operate semi-autonomously at times, feeding him generalized orders rather than guiding his every move. In which case, letting him tap into Elastigirl's camera was something she'd have to do, so he could monitor exactly when the heroine he was supposed to spar with until he got captured would arrive. Evelyn only slipped up in neglecting to have him cut off the feed before his opponent actually started beating on him.
  • We know for sure that Evelyn wasn't piloting the Screenslaver around the time Helen took him down; right when Screenslaver hijacks the news signal so Helen can track him, we see Evelyn watching through the suit-feed with Winston standing right next to her. If she'd given any orders to the pizza guy at that point, her brother would've noticed it.

Makes no sense?

• A lot of reviews criticizing Evelyn for her plan not making sense, as despite wanting to immortalize the superhero ban forever, she actually helps them get to a point where they can be legalized again. But Evelyn only did all that by helping Winston, didn't she? He probably would've gone ahead with the plan with or without her help, and it's clear that she only went along with it so she could pull off the ultimate sabotage right at the end, while making herself seem innocent. Was she expected to sit idly by and do nothing while that thing she loathes so much comes back into fruition?
  • If she hadn't helped him, Winston would have likely fallen on his face. It is possible she loves her brother more than she hates supers, that there was a real dilemma that lead to her plan, but the movie didn't go into that. As is, she decided to convince the public to believe something they already seemed to believe by killing a bunch of people, including a diplomat in the middle of ending a war. Making her brother a little more upset seems a lot easier, both intellectually and logistically, than killing a bunch of people.
  • "If she hadn't helped him, Winston would have likely fallen on his face." This is the part I don't understand; couldn't Winston have just hired someone to do what Evelyn ended up doing? It seems like the only benefit to having her do it was that it was free.
  • I believe the point being made is that without Evelyn's creation of Screenslaver, which is largely the reason Winston's plan goes so smoothly, he never would have had a chance barring being in the right place at the right time. Granted, he did go for a high-crime rate city to help, but he basically hit the jackpot with a big villain like Screenslaver. Winston doesn't even know that Evelyn created the character, so there's no way anyone else could fill in her shoes had she decided to not help. Hence, "Winston would have likely fallen on his face."
  • Evelyn's plan seems to be to let the Supers buy back some credibility through heroics and then have them turn on the public as soon as they are legal again. The idea being that the public will see the Supers as always having done super heroics just to build good PR, and having been ready to turn on them as soon as they got a chance; Thereby destroying public faith in Supers, and probably for much longer than if they hadn't "betrayed" everyone.

What is Underminer going to do with the money?

• He is a wanted criminal. How is he going to spend it? He can't just walk into a store and shop.
  • Presumably he'll take off his costume first. Or he'll dig himself to another country to spend it where he's not a wanted criminal.
  • He might use towards his goal from the first movie.
  • It seems unlikely that the money could even have paid for the equipment he used to steal it in the first place. It's probably just a stand-in motivation; the Underminer stole money because that's what villains do.
  • What do real-life bank robbers do with their real-life money? Obviously it works out somehow. If need be they can pay an unknown criminal to do their shopping for them.
  • It's unlikely that even a genius could've built that huge machine by himself. He was probably a part of some evil organisation that could also take care of money laundering.

Hypnosis is not enslavement

• There is a strong hint screen-slaver technology was developed through rigorous study of hypnotics. Fair enough: a news anchor might have a reflexive desire to read what is put in front of him, a delivery guy might be fed up with doing things for other people, a wife might want to hit her husband sometimes. But when the supers give their speech about vengeance towards the ungrateful society that uses and discards them at will, they have no enthusiasm, no passion, they aren't even trying to make it sound like they believe their own words. It's a sensible motive, but the movie strongly implies they do not have any desire to smash civilians. So screen slaver shouldn't have been able to make them do it right? That's left the realm of hypnosis and moved into Psychic Powers, Inception or something.
  • I don't think Evelyn was planning on making the hypnotized supers do anything like what they advertised, especially since they were all trapped on an out-of-control hydrofoil and would probably be killed once it reaches the shoreline and crashes. She just needed people to think supers were such a bad idea that they wouldn't think to legalize them again - the threatening speech they gave combined with the boat crash would be enough for that.
  • It's comic book science, not actual science.
  • I'm not an expert on the subject, but I don't understand the point of this. While I doubt it could make you do anything, I've never heard of hypnosis only leading you to do things that you might be predisposed to doing anyway.
    • Hypnosis makes one more comfortable with acts fear, pride, better judgment, things along those lines, get in the way of. Suggestion is necessary when hypnotizing others, because ideas are being given. One might not realize they need sleep and go to sleep thanks to hypnotic suggestion, but if one has no desire to sleep, hypnosis can not induce sleep unless one stays hypnotized long enough to get tired enough. And trying to make someone do something they really don't want to do is a good way to break a trance. That's all hypnosis is, a trance that makes one more focused on their wants, sometimes detrimentally(you know you want to smoke those cigarettes), sometimes beneficially(you know you want to throw out those cigarettes), sometimes as a trick (balance that cigarette on your tongue). What's more, the movie seemed to be doing a halfway decent job of showing that up until the boat speech, but let's just go with "comic book science" or something.

Why reveal yourself to Winston?

• I get that Evelyn was pretty frustrated at that point, but why did she have to reveal her role in the plot to her brother as they were about to escape from the hydrofoil? Winston's first thought once the hypnosis wears off is that he passed out, and the crash was already being framed as the supers going on a rampage - why not just tell him they knocked him out and killed all the delegates (so he wouldn't feel pressured to go back for them) and that she just barely managed to get him to safety? She had to have had this escape planned in advance, so why wouldn't she have had a good cover story ready?
  • The real reason is probably to concisely resolve as much of the plot as possible in the movie's run time, but given that she thinks of her brother as a child, a greedy child focused on his own profit. She might have underestimated his resolve, his more selfless tendencies, not expected him to return to a compromised hydrofoil at great risk to his life, and thus not planned things through well enough.

So what if the bank was insured?

• The cops try to make a big point about how all the money in the bank vault was insured & thus replaceable, so that's why they claim the Incredibles should've left Underminer alone. But Underminer blew up several buildings & created a massive sinkhole to get into that vault, most likely killing|wounding a bunch of people in the process. Those people aren't replaceable like the money is.
  • True, but that would've been the case whether the family stepped in or not. The point was that they didn't do anything but make things worse, by causing a bunch of damage to the city's infrastructure, and the fact that the Underminer still got away means all of it was completely for nothing.

Destroying trust in technology

• During her tell-all speech to Elastigirl, Evelyn mentions that she's using her hypnosis technology to destroy people's trust in it. This would tie into other things that are stressed to the audience (like the Screenslaver's speech, and how everyone is shown watching TV all the time), but I don't think Evelyn brings it up at any other point in the story. The rest of the time, her plan revolves specifically around discrediting supers so that they remain illegal. Was discrediting technology something she was going to focus on after the hydrofoil crash, or was it just a weird line that was thrown in as an afterthought or something?
  • Discrediting supers is the current agenda, other things can happen at other times. And she could just be coming up with a justification for the sake of having a justification. I betrayed your trust, could have killed you and many other people several times over had things gone just a little wrong, am currently doing something I'm sure is no good for your health and am going to keep doing more of the same, but I'm a good guy, really.

Stopping the train

• How come no one on the monorail made any attempt to get into the conductor/operator's room and stop it?
  • "You want superheroes to protect you and make yourselves ever more powerless in the process." Even with superheroes underground, people still have learned helplessness
    • Bystander effect
  • The cab of a train is nothing like the driving seat of a car. Remember the first time you ever got into a car when you were a kid, did you know exactly what all the knobs and levers and pedals did without having someone explain them to you? Do you know what the brake lever looks like in a train cab?
    • I suppose not. But I'd probably know enough to pull the operator away from a screen that was obviously hypnotizing him. No one could've done that?
• It is supposed to be a fast train. How long did it take anyone to realize something was wrong. How often does a real subway or bullet train crash with occupants claiming to see it coming early enough to stop it?
  • It was set up to go this way, started going this way then stopped and went into reverse, going that way even faster. It shows everybody going 'Oh!' and being surprised when it reversed.
• It's entirely possible someone did make an attempt to get in that we didn't see, but passenger trains usually have the door to the operator's station locked.

How old are the Deavor siblings?

• Both their ages seem difficult to pin down...On the one hand, the deaths of their parents (which occurred 15 years before the film, when supers went underground) factor heavily into both characters' motivations, which would make more sense if they were very young when it happened, as most sources suggest they were; what's more, it's stated that the two of them betrayed everyone's expectations with how they managed to run their father's company on their own, something no one thought they could do. On the other hand, both parents appeared quite old at the time of their deaths, and Winston recalls how proud his father was of his connection to the supers. (I'm assuming this connection was Winston training under Rick Dicker like Frozone mentioned, but he wouldn't have done that kind of work when he was still a little kid.)
  • They look to be in their late twenties to early 30s.
    • Definitely in their 30s. The junior novel of the movie further elaborates on Winston and his connection with the supers. The book mentions how he worked for the NSA for a short time before the superheroes were made illegal, probably intending to become what Dicker was if the supers hadn't been made illegal and his father hadn't been killed. He had to have been at least in his late teens or in his twenties if he was an agent for the NSA.

Core beliefs

• During their confrontation on the plane, Evelyn laments that she and Helen could've been good friends, if not for Helen's "core beliefs"...The fact that she says this seems odd to me. I know that Evelyn is supposed to come off as The Cynic who's only lashing out at supers due to her bitterness over her parents' deaths, without caring who gets hurt in the process. But in-universe, she's supposed to think of herself as well-intentioned for wanting supers to remain illegal so that everyone stops relying on them, and earlier pointed out she and Helen have no reason to put their trust in one another, aside from the fact that Helen's a super. But mocking her core beliefs suggests that Evelyn is aware that her agenda is just the flimsy means to an end, not something she actually believes in or is interested in pursuing in a practical sense.
  • Which would be perfectly in character for Evelyn. She just likes messing with people, and anything she says about why she's doing it is a flimsy excuse. And she doesn't care how flimsy if she can get away with it. Why did she wake up Helen just to gloat about her plan? Because she likes to be in control and tell people how stupid they were to underestimate her.
  • I took it to mean "Our core beliefs are opposed", not "You have core beliefs, unlike me".
    • I considered that, as well, but it doesn't really match how Evelyn says the line. "If it weren't for your "core beliefs," like she's blaming it on her or mocking her for having them.
  • She's saying she can't be friends with Helen because of what Helen's core beliefs are, not because Helen has any kind of core beliefs at all. The latter just plain doesn't make sense.

Mr. I's old suit?

• When meeting the Deavors for the first time, Bob wears an old Mr. Incredible suit, but we later see that it's not the one he had in the display case, wore to Nomanisan, and got repaired, as that one is in the case among the explosion-damaged items Bob is unpacking. Sure, it's reasonable he'd have multiple copies of his old suit, but then why did he apparently have only the one in the case in the first movie?
  • I think it's more likely that he does only have one suit and it was just a continuity error. Having two of them would raise the question of why he needed to have the torn one repaired in the first movie, instead of storing it away and putting the second, undamaged one in the display case.
  • We see no sign of the mannequin that the suit was displayed on during the first movie. Perhaps in that box of memorabilia was where the suit lived since the crashing-jet-house-burning incident

The broken controller.

• So are the Parrs going to have to do the walk of shame to E's and ask for another controller device for Jack-Jack's suit? And since it broke, does it mean Edna can't apply the same principles of indestructibility to electronics? Or was Jack-Jack just so strong as a giant baby that it was too much?
  • Considering what the family had just gone through, I think E would understand about having to replace the controller. And she may not have made it as indestructible as the suits because it wasn't really necessary - an indestructible supersuit offers greater protection against serious injury or death. The controller being broken is mostly a minor inconvenience.
  • E put Jack-Jack's suit and controller together in a single night, a night in which she also actively babysat Jack-Jack. No doubt if she had had a little more time she would have also made the controller as indestructible as the suit, but to be fair she had already far exceeded Robert's expectations.

The little girl at the rally

• What was up with that little girl and the "Screenslaver is STILL out there" sign she was holding? Did her family not like superheroes, and so were trying to lower Elastigirl's morale by reminding her of her failure? I can't figure out what the ramifications are...The Nightmare Fuel page suggests she was hypnotized into doing it, but that contradicts how the hypnosis works in the movie - you have to be constantly looking at the screen to remain under control, and as soon as it's removed from your view, the effect wears off and you forget you were even hypnotized.
  • Evelyn or some adult she hypnotized or even just some low-paid DEVTECH staffer was there giving out signs to the cheering crowd. They go up to the girl and say "Hey kid, Elastigirl is coming this way, why don't you hold one of these signs to help welcome her? Thanks sweetie." Done and no Nightmare Fuel required.
  • Or she could just be a concerned kid. 'That screen slaver is such a jerk, if only someone would stop playing around and take care of that. Hey, you, the one who jumps between helicopters! I don't see you doing anything important, you do it!'.
  • Or, alternately, "Screenslaver is still out there" could be taken to mean, "A crazed supervillain is at large! See, lawmakers? This is PROOF that we need superheroes around!"

How do supers make a living?

• Bob seems to treat "Accept the Deavors' offer" and "Get a job before we become homeless" as two mutually exclusive options. While I'm sure Winston was going to pay the family for Helen's services regardless, is it normal for supers to be paid for superhero-ing? Or is it something they do on the side and occupy themselves with a regular day job using their secret identities?
  • Because both films deal with the period in which Supers are illegal, it never shows what/how the Supers do in their secret identity nor how/if Supers were compensated for their service. It's strongly implied that the government financially backed the supers during the Golden Age but no details were provided. Any answers beyond this would be speculation.
    • In the first film, Mirage pays Bob for stopping the Omnidroid and apparently did so to lure the other supers to the island. So it can be assumed that aside from working with the government, they can take on jobs like independent contractors and are paid for their services.
    • At that point, superheroes were already illegal. Mirage's offer was illegal. That's why Bob never told his wife about it. (Or that's part of the reason, anyway.) If it was legal to use your powers at all, Bob surely would have gotten a gig that involved actually using his strength instead of pushing pencils in an office all day. (He could easily be employed as a one-man demolition crew, for instance.)
  • In the first film a broadcaster states that Mr. Incredible's lawsuits "cost the government millions." In the DVD extras Helen complains about the difficulty in paying for her costumes and is told to "save her receipts." So there's decent evidence to suggest the NSA subsidizes superheroes, perhaps up to and including providing them a wage.

Why didn't she open another portal?

• When Elastigirl was trying to save Evelyn from falling into the sea, why couldn't Voyd just open a portal beneath them that would spit them out higher in the air? That would've given Elastigirl enough time to catch her and make a chute that would slow their descent.
  • Because she's young, nervous, inexperienced and panicking. I.e., she is not operating with the benefit of hindsight, or the casual comfort of a user at his or her computer looking at a website.
  • Rule of Three: She'd ported her three times, and Rule of Drama. More cliffhangery if there's some sort of tension; if she just kept juggling the two of them it wouldn't have been dramatic.

How long were they on the boat?

• The kids reach the Everjust at around sunrise. Vi leaves Dash to go search for their parents, and glimpses them entering the conference room for the televised signing. Moments later, the delegates all get hypnotized and the supers storm the bridge, leading into the climax, where it's now sunset outside. What were the kids doing during all that time that took so long?
  • It's just a simple goof. No In-Universe explanation would make sense. There is no "canon" answer.

Going along with it

• How come Bob never questions how Jack-Jack keeps getting out of his crib? Even after he blocks him in by placing a table on top, he doesn't show any surprise that Jack-Jack was able to escape.
  • He's very, very tired and his brain isn't firing on all cylinders at that point.
  • Toddlers which have just reached the "barely walking" stage are notorious for being able to get into and out of places you'd think were impossible. Bob was definitely tired and probably doubting himself as to whether Helen ever mentioned that Jack-Jack was getting out of the crib by himself. Of course, there's no way he'd call her up to ask so he just went with it. It's not like it happens a lot of times in the story before Bob learns that Jack-Jack has powers.

Incredibile Remote

• I can accept that Mr. Incredible still has the remote; he is seen unpacking memorabilia that (somehow) survived the destruction of their house at the end of the first film. But the batteries are still good, after all those years? And it has, basically, infinite range? Incredible!
  • The remote has a "summon" button which calls the Incredibile to the remote's location. That function wouldn't be much use if it didn't have a very long range. We saw in the first movie that Edna was able to put a tracking device in her suits that had a world-wide range so the movie series has established that such technology exists. In addition, the car arrives just a few minutes after Dash summons it, so it couldn't have been that far away to begin with.
  • As far as the batteries go, we see Bob enter his study and pull the remote from the box, the scene then cuts back to Dash watching the TV. There is a noticeable pause before Bob rejoins the scene and uses the remote on the car. Enough time for him to plausibly throw in some fresh batteries, especially if he had new batteries in the same box as the remote.

Where did Screech go?

• After the fight on the Everjust, every wannabe who was defeated could be seen in the bridge when Helen makes her plan...except for Screech. Then we see the family on the deck not long after and he's not there either! Where did he go?
  • It's implied that while the Parrs, Lucius and Voyd were working on turning the hydrofoil/stopping Evelyn, the less-experienced DevTech supers were helping Winston escort the diplomats to safety...Granted, the only evidence we see of this is Brick prying open the doors and telling everyone to follow her, but it's better than nothing.

Blaming the family

• Why would the police assume that there wouldn't be any additional damage if the Incredibles hadn't stepped in to fight the Underminer? As far as they know, the Underminer could've set his drill tank to destroy more of the city while he made his escape, and the family did stop it from destroying City Hall...Unless he confessed it to them, there was no evidence that Bob was the one who mistakenly activated the drill tank.
  • Iirc Winston and Rick both mentioned Sleazy Politician's, so they're probably paying the police force to act that way. They would have never acted this way had supers still been legal. Remember, the police force was more than willing to help Mr. Incredible in the first parts of the first movie.

An Obvious Flaw?

• Evelyn's whole goal is to make the general public believe that superhumans think regular people are idiots while they are a "superior" race, turning opinion against them. She has the mind-controlled Bob, Helen, and Lucius deliver a widely-broadcast speech about that subject on the deck of the yacht. The issue, though, is that all three heroes are speaking in a Creepy Monotone that practically screams "I've been hypnotized" while wearing goggles that have never been part of their uniforms before—goggles that look very similar to Screenslaver's, who has also been making public speeches. Furthermore, Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, and Frozone were popular heroes in their day who have never hinted at any sort of disdain or frustration with the populace (barring Mr. Incredible's joking speech in the interview clips at the beginning of the first movie—"Sometimes I feel like the maid!"—but that's clearly done in good fun). And to top it all off, Screenslaver—a villain whose entire shtick is mind-control—is a well-known person at this point, so everyday people would be keenly aware that someone with hypnotic powers is on the loose. As such, it seems incredibly unlikely that anyone watching the big speech would think "Wow, supers hate us, so let's hate them, too," because the evidence of Bob, Helen, and Lucius being brainwashed is so blatant. The only possible explanation I can think of is that Evelyn herself thinks the general public are morons who would easily fall for the trick, but that's not entirely satisfying...
  • Sadly, in order for Evelyn's plan to work, she doesn't have to fool everyone, she only has to fool enough people to derail the superhero legalization process. Are Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone wearing weird goggles and speaking in a monotone... yes. But if Evelyn's plan succeeded as planned, a giant yacht would have slammed into the city causing mass destruction and killing those aboard... the politicians and the other superheroes.
    The superhero legalization process would be postponed as the catastrophe is investigated. The various governments would want to know what happened to their representatives causing political turmoil. Meanwhile public opinion is open to be molded. Evelyn would likely hypnotize various anti-super activists to spew forth vitriolic anti-super sentiments to inflame the public.
    Sure, some will point out the likelihood that Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone were hypnotized but that can be countered by anti-supers claiming the other dozen or so other supers on the ship couldn't have all been hypnotized at the same time and will use that approach to justify that all supers were actually in agreement with the "humans are idiots" belief.
    And so it will go, back and forth, either never coming to a definite conclusion or even if facts come forth to exonerate the supers, there will be those that reject those facts and continue to lobby for keeping supers illegal.
    It may not make for a satisfying conclusion but it is one that is quite likely.
  • Besides the above, an (admittedly brazen) argument could be made that if the superheroes allowed themselves to be hypnotized, then they're a threat regardless of what they conciously feel. Who's to say another Screenslaver won't use them to actually take over the world instead of simply making a point? There's only one way to eliminate the threat for sure... As above, the argument doesn't need to be airtight - it needs to be just convincing enough to sow the seeds of doubt in people.

Speaking in monotone

• At several points when the Screenslaver's victims speak while under hypnosis, they do so in a flat, stilted, monotone voice, suggesting that the goggles can't make them convey the emotion of whatever they're scripted to say — but Voyd is able to emote normally when telling Evelyn about how the kids escaped in the Incredibile. Why are they able to emote only in some instances, then? Wouldn't Evelyn want them to do so more often, seeing as it would make her scheme less obvious?
  • The monotone speech seems to occur when the hypnotized person is "reading from a script" that Evelyn prepared, ie a long, complex monologue that may not be something the hypnotized host even believes, thus a bland monotone is the best that can be achieved. The Voyd response was something that had to come from hypnotized Voyd's own experience and memory, it wasn't a preplanned speech. So maybe when the actual person contributes to what's being said, it allows for more feeling and inflection to come in.

Evelyn during her escape

• Why is she being so smug? She's just been exposed, and even if she beats Elastagirl and escapes, there's absolutely no guarantee that superheroes won't be able to stop the ship, and then she's screwed. She's not a supervillain with her own remote island base and an army of mooks (as far as we know) - she has nowhere to run and nowhere to land that plane where the police won't be waiting for her. In fact it would be the perfect moment to surrender and throw herself at Elastigirl's mercy, and instead she tries to murder her?!
  • She had enough resources to build that giant freezing tank to hold Elastigirl so she could monologue to her, and Violet supposes (and Winston doesn’t deny) that she has the money/connections/whatever to significantly lighten whatever punishment she ultimately receives. She’s probably got somewhere she can go. In addition, Helen’s the only one who knows firsthand that Evelyn’s the Screenslaver, so whether the boat crashes or not, her crimes will become a lot harder to prove if Helen dies.

Kari's New Life

• Did Dicker assign Kari a new job like Tony?