Headscratchers / The 10th Kingdom

• Why didn't Virginia call the police after she trapped the trolls in the elevator or after Wolf attempted to eat her grandmother?
  • Because both of those situations were way too crazy for the police to believe?
  • Not really, they're basically just a flamboyant serial killer and a weird-looking street gang as far as she knows at that point.
    • She knows the dog can understand human speech, so she's probably taken the trolls at their word that they are trolls. If she called the police about them, or Wolf, she'd be asked a lot of questions and probably start babbling about intelligent dogs and look crazy. She's spooked, she's not in the clearest frame of mind.
• Why does Prince Wendell's voice sound muffled when he's holding a pencil in his mouth? He speaks via telepathy, if that.
  • Rule of Funny, methinks.
  • It's not telepathy, it's magical translation of Dog to English, so when his mouth is full his voice is muffled.
• Why is it the key Tony got the Tooth Fairy to make didn't work on the door? I can see three explanations:
  • It was the wrong key.
  • The watch Tony gave the Tooth Fairy was in fact fake (lampshaded by him having doubted its authenticity himself as a Call-Forward to this moment), so the Tooth Fairy retaliated by making a faulty key.
  • There was a prong or other shape to push aside tumblers on the other side of the key which didn't get reproduced, since the impression in the soap was only for one side. (See Indiana Jones and Toht only having one side of the medallion burned in his palm.)
• What happened when Wolf gave his will to the Queen? She gave him a very intense stare and it appeared to be magically binding, but afterwards he seemed to have the power to disobey her when he wanted to. Was it magic, or just a regular promise to serve her?
  • From the point he meets Virginia onward, he isn't "able to disobey whenever he wants" so much as constantly fighting/resisting her. The implication is either that True Love could undo her compulsion/binding or that Wolf was very strong-willed and could break free once he had something/someone else to believe in.
  • One other possible explanation: although Wolf does react strongly to Virginia's appearance and scent when he meets her, and immediately starts flirting and attempting to seduce her, he does still remain persistent in wanting to claim Wendell from her. It isn't until after she knocks him out the window that he seems to stop trying to capture Wendell and take him to the Queen—even after the subplot with rescuing Virginia from the Troll Palace, he never again mentions taking Wendell back to his stepmother, in fact he quite willingly sneaks back into the prison with Virginia to rescue Wendell (and Tony). Even if he couldn't do anything to harm or kidnap him while Virginia and Tony were watching, it's still a very clear change in his overall behavior...suggesting that perhaps being knocked out the window either affected Wolf's memory, or directly helped weaken or break the Queen's hold over him. Or at the very least, that this might have been an additional aid on top of True Love and having a strong willpower.
  • The Queen does still at least try to influence Wolf when he's wolfing out in the barn and escapes his restraints.
  • Alternatively, perhaps serving the Queen's daughter was enough to qualify for the spell. He goes immediately from serving the queen to being devoted to Virginia, and remains such for the rest of the series. And he says he knew she was her daughter from the first moment he smelt her, so the timing of the switch fits.
  • Snow White was helping Virginia out by shielding her from the Queen's mirrors, so maybe she was able to help undo the spell or nullify it once it was obvious Wolf was going to help Virginia.
• Was there some kind of romance between the Huntsman and the Queen? In his first scene, he kisses her hand and she presses it to her cheek, but it's never hinted at again.
  • Entirely possible. The fact she is so powerful would make her the strongest predator of all other than himself in his eyes, and therefore probably the only one worthy of such a thing. On the other hand it could just be a sign of medieval fealty/villainous devotion.
• Seriously, what the goddamn hell were the writers thinking with the Gypsy subplot? Colorful magic stereotypes are one thing, but the warnings Wolf gives Virginia and her father are straight out of the Middle Ages and Nazi Germany. Gypsies aren't even relevant to the famous (to Westerners) fairy tales this series revolves around. It would be comparable to "What Makes the Red Man Red", except that "Tenth Kingdom" was made after the turn of the century.
  • The writer, Simon Moore, is British, so he would at least be more aware of (and even possibly influenced by) such stereotypes than American viewers. Why he would think it appropriate to include them is another matter. On some level they are clearly there to add more complexity to Wolf by making him a hypocrite (and showing the oppressed can still be racist too), but their portrayal and plot goes beyond this once the curse is included—which is ironic, since before that the whole scene with Wolf, the Gypsy Queen, and her grandson completely proved Wolf's prejudice wrong, and the Gypsies' previous attitude as either well-justified suspicions of strangers or a Secret Test of Character. If Moore had just stopped there... They also exist to provide prophetic hints for Wolf and Because Destiny Says So for Virginia, but those could easily have been included another way and are themselves another stereotype (albeit one based to some extent on reality).
  • You forget that the internet was not a widespread thing in 2000 when the miniseries first premiered. Shows weren't used to people taking to their keyboards and complaining about Unfortunate Implications 24/7. From my own memory, stereotypes about gypsies did persist well into the early 2000s. Buffy and Charmed featured them as stock magic users (though Charmed were quite non-stereotypical, surprisingly enough). In the early 2000s a lot of people would assume racism just meant against black people. Political correctness didn't really emerge until the middle of the decade.
• When the Trolls capture Virginia they give her a large tattoo on her stomach that says 'Troll Toy.' This tattoo is never seen again, even in shots where it should be visible. Magical tattoo or plain old continuity error?
  • Perhaps it was only drawn on with wash-away ink, rather than permanently injected? Although it would be odd for Trolls to be so...considerate. Maybe a magical tattoo that either lasted only so long as she was in the Troll Palace, or which would have become permanent if she'd stayed there longer (but Wolf broke her out too soon)?
  • I always assumed it was an ink stamp and not a tattoo at all.
• The Queen's plan was a brilliant one but with one big flaw. Her own escape. The fact that she has been in prison for several years suggests she couldn't break out herself. Which makes sense as she seems to have three main methods of doing things: her mirrors, poison (neither of which she had access to in prison), and a kind of magical compulsion that seems to require a certain amount of proximity to her to initiate and can be fought if one has a strong enough will. Her accommodations in the prison show they have taken precautions against all three. So how was she expecting to escape if the Troll King didn't happen to be in the prison at the right time? His dialogue makes it clear he's just there to rescue his offspring and had no intention of going anywhere near the Queen until he hears her calling him. And for that matter how did she intend to snatch Wendell if he wasn't at the prison at the time of her escape? If she had escaped and tried to snatch him later it would be much more difficult. The moment they found out she had escaped they would keep him under constant watch. She clearly knew what time and day Wendell was coming as he was there to deny her parole but she had no way of ensuring the Troll King would be there at the exact same time. He clearly isn't there on her orders.
  • Hoping that Wendell would be careless when he visited her?
  • Perhaps she had another plan, but the Troll King's arrival made things much easier for her.