Headscratchers / The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause

• If Jack Frost wanted to be Santa, why didn't he just kill Scott?
  • It'd be a hell of a lot easier. Kill Santa, and grab his coat before anybody else can. Don't have to worry about time-travel shenanigans.
    • Easier, yes. But challenging? No. Sometimes villains use unnecessarily complicated schemes because the obviously simple solutions don't give as much of a challenge.
    • A better explanation would be that intentionally murdering Santa would be a lot harder than accidentally making him slip and fall off your roof by startling him.
    • Also you've got to figure that, bad as he was, Jack Frost may simply not be a cold-blooded killer. (Pun not intended.) The other Santa was effectively already dead, all Jack had to do was replace Scott as the person who caused it, which probably to him is a little different than, say, stabbing someone in the eyesocket with an icicle. Plus, y'know... it's a family movie.
    • Jack is a magical being, and so is Santa. There may be some kind of pact that such beings can't go against each other too directly without it going wrong.
    • The movie states that their powers don't work on each other. And I doubt the council of legendary beings would be so forgiving of him killing another legendary being, as opposed to having no idea about Jack Frost stealing the job.
• What's the point of a nice list if Santa doesn't deliver presents anymore? In this movie, after Frost becomes Santa, Scott makes his way to the theme park North Pole, where Curtis offers a pass for the nice list and reveals parents pay to get their kids on it. A bit later, Frost comments that he stopped delivering the gifts and just lets anyone that can afford it come up there. So, what's the nice list for?
  • Bragging rights.
• When Jack goes back in time to stop Scott from becoming Santa so he could, and we go back to the present day, there is a big plot that is missing, in the second movie Scott has to get married to keep the role as Santa, so where is Jack's wife as Santa?
  • Fiji. He probably found someone to agree to be Mrs. Claus by agreeing to pay her to live in luxury somewhere far away from him. Goes with the style of his Christmas.
• So, how exactly how does the Escape Clause work? Because the way it works on paper is that you say "I wish I'd never been Santa at all," go back in time to undo your life as Santa and that'd be that. However, the way it works in the movie is that you go back in time to when you became Santa Claus... But everything would unfold as it had before barring outside interference, as we see when it's invoked the second time. Without bringing along another person to take the coat and take up the mantle of Santa or risk upsetting some sort of temporal balance by interfering themselves, how would a Santa Claus successfully invoke the Escape Clause?
  • The first time the Escape Clause was invoked, we don't see Scott Calvin's past self. It's likely that, when the Escape Clause is invoked, they become their past self, and all Scott would have to do is not go outside and yell at Santa, causing him to fall off the roof. This is further suggested by the fact that there aren't two Jack Frosts when Jack Frost is tricked into invoking the Escape Clause, but there are two Scotts (the Past Scott from the original timeline, and the present Scott from the timeline where Jack Frost became Santa), not three (the one from Jack and his previous trip back isn't there just as Jack's isn't there ).