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Plot Holes are those annoying gaps in a story where things happen without a logical reason. When a plot hole involves something essential to a story's outcome, it can hurt the believability severely for those who are bothered by it. Hitting a Plot Hole at high speed can damage your Suspension Of Disbelief.
Plot holes can come in many forms:
- Characters suddenly having knowledge that was never passed to them.
- Characters acting completely out of character.
- An event does not logically follow from what has gone before.
Plot holes occur for several reasons:
- The author really wants to write a certain scene, even if the scene makes no sense. Rather than toss the scene out, the author goes right ahead and writes it anyway.
- The author forgets what was written earlier, and unknowingly creates a scene that goes completely against something that happened earlier. Can happen with really long stories, or ones that take a long time to write.
- In a multi-author continuity, one writer forgets (or ignores, or rejects) what another wrote.
- The scene that would have filled the plot hole was cut due to time constraints.
- While adapting a story to a new medium, the adaption team made a wrong assumption about a future plot point, and added a detail which was later contradicted by the creator of the source material. (Compare Overtook The Manga.)
- A change is made during the localization of a work without also changing other elements that rely on it.
Even unrealistic, fantastical stories suffer when plot holes arise, as audiences are willing to suspend disbelief as long as the story makes sense within its own rules and consistency.
Plot holes are sometimes plugged up or ignored with a Hand Wave, or occasionally dealt with by a Lampshade Hanging, and some writers think Plot Holes that only become apparent well after the story is over aren't worth sweating.
In some cases, what one person sees as a plot hole could be seen by another as something that makes sense if enough thought is put into it, or makes sense but was not adequately explained. Examples here will therefore be subjective. Contrast What Happened To The Mouse for plots that get dropped... and picked up.
Of course, some stories contain plot holes as part of their basic nature. This includes many ludicrously comical works, and everything involving a Timey Wimey Ball.
Can overlap with Ret Con and Continuity Snarl.
Examples
Anime
- Nadia The Secret of Blue Water suffered from at least twelve episodes (the "Island/Africa" episodes, which were shoehorned into the series to cash in on the show's popularity) in which members of the cast go completely out of character with no explanation. The Lincoln Island and Africa episodes are especially guilty of this, particularly in the characterizations of Nadia, Grandis, Ayerton, Sanson, Marie, Sanson, and Hanson.
- In Dragonball Z, perhaps to enhance the idea that the main characters have a superhero-esque role, the main public doesn't know about Ki Attacks, super speed, flight, or many of the other techniques used by the characters of the show. The public (and the Fake Ultimate Hero) treat these as tricks or acts of God and are completely against believing in them; thus, when the main characters enter the World Tournament in the last saga, they have to hide their powers. All this despite these techniques not only being exhibited in earlier world tournaments not ten years prior, but many of them also being world famous, and the ones who invented revered throughout the world, only a decade or so ago. Amnesia dust all around... One Big Bad acknowledges this, pointing out that mankind has already forgotten Goku.
- When Transformers: Cybertron was translated into English, it was changed from a standalone series to a sequel to Energon; unfortunately, this meant that several characters who were Killed Off For Real in Energon were alive and well here. It was explained that the reappearance of these characters happened because the Unicron Singularity
 screwed up space and time; this led fans to jokingly refer to the Singularity as the biggest plot hole in the universe.
- ''Transformers: The English version did fix a plot hole that was present in the original Japanese. In the English version, Cybertron spends the series hovering perilously close to the Singularity. In the Japanese version, it was sucked into the Singularity in the first episode; yet several subsequent episodes show the characters walking around on the surface.
- T Fwiki appears to imply the opposite - that it was intended as a sequel to Armada/Energon but that the Japanese broadcasters decided to market it as a reboot. Although thus was also later retconned away and it's now part of the Unicron Trilogy in Japan...
- In Bleach, at one point in the manga Aizen states that the deaths of a few arrancar don't bug him since they were only gillians originally. Cue a flashback a bunch of chapters later when it's revealed that the characters in question were almost all adjuchas, and that it would have been impossible for them to regress to gillians without also losing their individuality! OOPS! Could be handwaved by him calling them gillians as an insult but that's a bit of a stretch. Or Aizen just doesn't care
- In the Viz translation of the manga, Uryu says that Grimmjow had "a mixed unit of gillians and adjuchas" (although Grimmjow could be the Adjuchas and everyone else could be Gillians). After his last fight with Ichigo, the origins of Grimmjow and his Fraccion are explored and only one of them was a Gillian, the rest were clearly Adjuchas.
- In the Fake Karakura arc, Izuru is revealed to be a former member of the fourth division (which specializes in healing), and is able to heal Rangiku, who had a large chunk of her abdomen torn away. This contradicts previous developments, like Aizen sending him to the third division to serve under Gin, and his having to call for fourth division members to heal Renji, who was less badly wounded than Rangiku, after his fight with Ichigo in the Soul Society arc. Well, it is possible he could've had a short stint with 4th somewhere in the decades between their Academy days and the present, but that would still an Asspull and it still doesn't explain the Renji situation. As in Real Life, rusty medic skills could kill someone. Kira may have decided that in that situation Renji wasn't so badly injured they couldn't wait for a 4th division member, you know, being in Soul Society and all rather than on an active battlefield.
- Fist of the North Star has been guilty of making up the story as it went along, resulting quite a few contradictions as the series went on...
- One of the biggest being the revelation in the second series that the Land of Asura is the birthplace Kenshiro and his adoptive brothers Raoh and Toki. This wouldn't be such an obvious plot hole had it not been for the fact that the first series already showed the ruins of Raoh and Toki's childhood home, as well as the graves of their true parents. The series later reveals that the big bad Kaioh is actually Raoh and Toki's elder brother, despite the fact that the first series gave no hints that they had any other blood-related siblings besides each other.
- Running a close second would be the scene where Mamiya revealed that she was branded as a 'conquest' by Juda. This scar is instantly recognized. Even though Rei, the rival of said Juda, had seen Mamiya butt-naked twice before — hell, he even personally shredded her clothes off once.
Comic Books
- Joss Whedon's second Astonishing X-Men story arc, "Danger," is based on the idea that the X-Men's Danger Room is sentient and incredibly frustrated because it was designed to kill the X-Men, but would never actually be able to do so due to its safety protocols. Apparently neither Whedon or his editors have read the dozen-plus comics in which the Danger Room's safety protocols have been disabled, with characters explicitly noting that they are in real danger of being killed.
- In Marvel Zombies, Luke Cage remarks at one point that he ate Doctor Strange, but yet Doctor Strange appears later in the series unharmed.
- One Superman/Batman plot involved Dr. Light pulling the mother of all What An Idiot moments with his entire plan, but one part of it made no sense: Dr. Light builds a rather phallic magic wand using some kind of crap about Zatanna's magic being based around light. OK. So how the fuck did it get to the North Pole? (Of course, this is far from the only problem with that story, but what the hell).
- A recent revelation in Wolverine says that Logan's adamantium is actually toxic and his healing factor is constantly having to counteract blood poisoning. Not only should a non-reactive indestructible metal not work like that (There's a reason metals like titanium and stainless steel are used in surgical implants), but it creates a big fat plot hole in the perfectly healthy forms of Lady Deathstrike, Cyber, and Bullseye (all of whom have adamantium skeletons) and the formerly healthy Hammerhead (who had an adamantium skull). You could handwave Deathstrike and Cyber (both being cyborgs who could presumably have systems that could deal with the toxicity). The otherwise normal human Bullseye and Hammerhead? Not so much.
Film
- Numerous scenes in the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives suggest that, as in the original, the wives have been replaced by robotic duplicates. However the ending reveals that they have all 'merely' had microchips planted in their brains, which completely contradicts the ATM wife earlier in the film. And the robotic boobs. The plot hole in this movie is a case of test audiences being idiots. Apparently the movie did originally use the robotic duplicate ending but the ultimate verdict was that it was unsatisfactory and was thus changed to be a happy win despite the fact that it completely changes and tramples the theme and message of the book.
- The movie Battlefield Earth is notorious for containing an alarming number of plot holes, which are quite ridiculous even inside the framework of the story.
- In Ocean's 11, the duffel bags of hooker ads magically appear in the vault elevator. Matt Damon and George Clooney don't carry them in. The Chinese acrobat couldn't fit them into his small case (nor could they get them up to the elevator, which was stopped), and the security guys carry them out before the fake SWAT team gets there.
- Rock N Rolla: How did Johnny Quid know that Lenny was the one who made a deal with the police in court? It has never been explained. Archie and the others couldn't figure it out for years as well as Mr. One-Two and Co. having to go though lots of effort to find that info. Which they did by bribing Stella's gay husband, who was a lawyer in criminal cases, a date promise from Handsome Bob. While Johnny somehow knew that secret all along. What is twice weird is that he didn't tell anyone about Lenny. He at least could've told Archie who was suppose to be his friend.
- In Terminator 2, the T-1000 is sent back in time despite the fact that it is all metal, which contradicts the earlier film's assertion that only objects surrounded by living tissue can travel through time. This is handwaved by asserting that the shapechanging T-1000 is composed of "living metal" that is somehow organic.
- Terminator 3 has two plot holes. After two movies of "no fate but what we make", signifying that the future is not set, a T-800 shows up and says that, in fact, fate cannot be changed, only delayed. If this is true, and the resistance knows this, then why doesn't Sky Net know this, and why are both of them fighting this war in the past if it won't really change anything? The second plot hole is Sky Net itself. At the end, John realizes that there's no server to destroy, that Sky Net has become sentient by distributing itself mong virtually every computer in the country. This is logical, until you consider that, in that form, Sky Net would not survive a nuclear war. Most civilian computers not fried in the blast would get taken out by EMP.
- Twilight Edward and the other vampires have no motivation for going to school. The movie goes out of its way to show that he has graduated from dozens of high schools. Just about anyone would agree that he looks old enough to have graduated, and he could always furnish a diploma to prove it.
- The books state that they stay in an area for a few years then move on for risk of being caught as never aging. As for Forks, they are due to move soon anyway as they have been there for over 5 years. Also, the movie DOESN'T go out of it's way to show that they have been to dozens of high schools, not even mentioning the fact, and the books say they haven't graduated from high school and they just wanted to get it over and done with as Edward even has multiple diplomas and could even be teaching his science teacher!
- The movie certainly does make a point of it, the vampires have a display of Graduation caps in a frame on the wall of their house and Edward even explains what they are in dialogue.
- The film version of Horton Hears A Who possibly follows this. Horton crosses a rickety wooden footbridge (the only way to get to Mt. Nool), but later in the film, the other characters somehow follow him, despite the bridge being gone. First pointed out here, has since been removed for some reason.
- In Star Wars: The Phantom Menace the audience is shown several Force powers the Jedi can use, including a scene with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon use super speed. Yet near the end, when Qui-Jon is being beaten by Darth Maul in battle, Obi-Wan is unable to run to him quickly enough before being cut off by a closing barrier.
- In Flightplan, the crew finds out that Kyle Pratt's daughter supposedly died with her father. What gets me is that no one on the crew thought to point out the obvious: Where is the other casket? If she was just acting out of grief and delusion, there should be two caskets in the plane, not just the one carrying her dead husband. Good thing Pratt's not an idiot. There is also a rare case of lampshade hanging making everything worse: Kyle does ask Carson where the other casket is and he claims that he doesn't care after the trouble she's caused everyone on board. While it's later revealed that he is the villain, this still only calls attention to the fact that Captain Rich and the other flight attendants don't care either. See: Voodoo Shark.
- Rock A Doodle. The farm animals believe that the rooster Chanticleer causes the sun to rise when he crows. Except one day Chanticleer doesn't crow and the sun rises anyway, so the animals make fun of him until he leaves. Then while he's gone, the sun never rises on the farm because Chanticleer isn't there to crow. So why did the sun come up that one time?
- The Nostalgia Critic's theory is that God made the sun go up just once to mess with Chanticleer's head.
- To be strictly correct, the sun came up that one time... but it went back down again almost straight away. While the animals were all still mocking Chanticleer for not being necessary to make it rise. This raises even more problems.
- In Elf, Santa's sleigh runs on people believing in Santa. Santa's sleigh doesn't work as well lately because less people believe in him now. So where are all those presents coming from?
- Possibly one of the most famous Plot Holes of all time: In Citizen Kane , the titular character dies alone in his bed, nobody around. So how do they know he whispered "Rosebud" as he died? It's generally assumed that the nurse heard him from the next room.
- In The Empire Strikes back, Luke is training on Dagobah with Yoda as Han, Leia, Chewy and C 3 P 0 are evading the Empire aboard the Millenium Falcon. Luke interrupts his training to go save his friends when they're captured in the cloud city. Which means that either the Falcon was evading the Empire for several months without ever resupplying, or Luke completed his Jedi training in a few hours (and I do mean "completed;" in the next movie Yoda waves him off and tells him there's nothing left to learn).
- Considering that the hyperdrive in the Falcon was broken for the whole trip, it's quite possible that it did take them several months. This doesn't help with the resupply problem, however.
- District9 ; the protagonists' plan is initially to fly to the main ship, but when that goes wrong there is a simple and less dangerous alternative ( the main ship is moved instead). With no explanation of why that wasn't the plan in the first place, or if there are any consequences.
- The best explanation is that 1. Because they weren't going on the ship yet, and moving it over where the transport is would just attract a lot of attention, 2. Maybe the black liquid is used in the carrier ship which is why they couldn't just beam the transport up in the first place.
Literature
- In Alexandre Dumas's famous novel The Three Musketeers, a minor plot hole occurs where Athos says a certain ring was inherited by his mother, then not a chapter later says it given to her by his father.
- Not only that, but Dartagnan is actually made a musketeer twice: once before they leave for the war, and another at the end of the book.
Live Action TV
- In one episode of Stargate SG 1, a recruit spots a plot hole in a training exercise.
- The last Star Trek series (to date), Enterprise, has the crew of the titular ship encounter Borg drones 200 years before they were encountered by Captain Picard and the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. This comes as a direct result of what happened in the film Star Trek: First Contact. The pieces of a crashed Borg cube are discovered in Antarctica. The crew see and fight Borgified crewmen on an alien freighter. The ship's doctor, Phlox, is infected with nanoprobes (but manages to cure himself, something Beverly Crusher wasn't able to do with Picard). They have sensor data on the Borg-augmented ship and their audio transmissions. Nevertheless, 200 years later, no one knows what the Borg look like, how they attack people, or what their technology does to starships and living beings. As the satirical website FirstTvDrama.com put it so eloquently:
"You can lay this side by side with Archer not bothering to ask the Ferengi for their name after they hijacked the ship. This time, they have tech, records, photos, scans, DNA samples, dead nano-bots, etc, and it only creates a bigger plot hole. There's an entire massive debris field site in the North Pole. How do you cover up something like that. They either nuked it (which would surely get the attention of the Vulcans), left it (which means it's still there), or they cleaned it all up, which means they further learned stuff from it. Remember kids, there was NO cover up that took place. So how do you explain this plot hole?"
- Forgive a possible justifying edit, but this troper is not so sure this is a plot hole. There was an episode of Voyager detailing Seven of Nine's backstory that explicitly stated her parents were studying the Borg when she was a little girl. Assuming no SORAS takes place, this means they were doing this before the episode "Q who." Let's call that exhibit A. Exhibit B is Star Trek Generations, which explicitly shows the Enterprise B rescuing the El Aurian survivors immediately after the Borg assimilated their world. It stands to reason that they would have described to the Borg to Star Fleet. Both of these together suggest that Star Fleet did have some limited knowledge of the Borg before the episode Q-who, but that episode still counts as "first contact" with them because it was their first encounter with a fully functional borg cube. Keeping this in mind, the episode from Enterprise seems less like a plot hole. Perhaps Star Fleet kept their data on the Borg classified for 200 years?
- And then when Picard reported his Q-assisted contact, Starfleet dug up its old files on the Borg, put the pieces together and assembled the research team that Commander Shelby was on by "The Best of Both Worlds"? It makes sense, although the writers almost certainly couldn't have plotted that all out ahead of time.
- This could also serve as an explanation for the source of the advanced technology Section 31 possesses in an otherwise open society.
- Another Enterprise episode sent the ship to investigate the first human colony outside the solar system to find out why it had suddenly stopped communicating with Earth - roughly eighty years prior. Nobody had been sent to check this out earlier, because humans didn't have sufficiently fast ships. When T'Pol points out that the Vulcans had such ships eighty years ago, and could have investigated immediately, Captain Archer says only that asking favors from the Vulcans tended to carry a high price. There is no further elaboration of this point, even though they later discover that prompt Vulcan disaster-recovery assistance would have been extremely helpful to the colonists.
- In the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "The Gift," Buffy sacrifices herself to prevent Dawn having to do so. She explains that she and Dawn have the same blood and so the requirement to end the spell - that Dawn's blood stop flowing - can be fulfilled by her as well as Dawn. However, by that logic, Buffy should have to die in addition to Dawn, not instead of her.
- Red Dwarf plays fast and loose with its own rules at the best of times, mostly because it's more concerned with being a sitcom. One notable example of many is a double-whammy: In "Backwards", how are Rimmer and Kryten able to keep in contact with Holly on Backwards Earth when the ship (and thus Holly's mainframe) is in a completely different part of space and time? And if Holly is in contact with them, why doesn't she just tell Lister and the Cat what happened to them, instead of leaving Lister and the Cat to trawl through space for three weeks before finding the time hole?
- In Sarah Jane Adventures, Mark of the Berserker, all commands given by the holder of the pendent cease the minute the pendant is released. Except Clyde commands his mom to 'forget everything that happened in this episode'. And then throws away the pendant.
- If the command was interpreted as purging the memories completely, they wouldn't come back immediately after the mind control was lifted - erased is erased. If the command was "suppress any thoughts about this episode's events", it would be a different case.
- Star Trek The Next Generation:
- The episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" has the Enterprise-C time-jump to an alternate "present", where the Federation and Klingon Empires have been at constant war for decades. It turns out that the Enterprise-C saved a Klingon outpost from a Romulan attack, thus opening the way for peace talks between the two governments. Star Trek VI, which came out the next year, shows that the groundwork for Klingon-Federation peace came about during Kirk's time as a result of the disaster on Praxis. It's not unreasonable to suppose that diplomatic relations may have deteriorated somewhat in the fifty years between Star Trek VI and the loss of the Enterprise-C.
- In the Star Trek The Original Series episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?", the Enterprise encounters a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. Kirk leads a landing party down to the nearby planet, where the alien reveals that he is the Greek god Apollo. Later in the episode, Spock, who had been on the Enterprise the whole time, makes reference to Apollo. There is no way Spock could have known who the alien was as Apollo immediately jammed the landing party's communicators.
- In Army of Darkness Ash chains Bad Ash to a table in the windmill he's squatting in before hacking him to pieces with his chainsaw. The problem with this is that during the scene where Ash arrived at the windmill his horse, which may have been carrying the chainsaw, was scared off into the woods by the evil entity chasing him. Ash was left to run to the windmill on foot, where he was clearly not carrying the chainsaw.
Theatre
- In Rodgers And Hammerstein's backstage musical Me and Juliet, some of the theatergoers are humming tunes from the Show Within A Show during intermission: "Marriage Type Love," "No Other Love," "It's Me." The problem here is that "It's Me" was only sung backstage, not onstage, so the audience shouldn't have heard it. Hammerstein privately acknowledged this mistake.
Video Games
- In Metroid Prime, the titular creature is sealed inside the impact crater by a Chozo spell, which was placed to prevent the phazon from further infecting the planet. However, a scan in the game indicated that the Space Pirates had captured the creature for study and imprisoned it in their lab, where it proceeded to steal a lot of weaponry and escape back to the crater. This warrants the question: how did the pirates and/or Metroid Prime both bypass the Chozo seal, when you yourself couldn't get through it until you completed the late-game Mac Guffin Fetch Quest to remove the seal?
- The Trilogy version has the Space Pirates merely detecting a creature but never actually finding Metroid Prime.
- The Trilogy version actually takes the above story from the PAL version of the original Metroid Prime.
- Banjo-Tooie: Early in the game, Gruntilda kills Bottles and later zombifies King Jingaling with the life force sucking B.O.B., planning to use the life force drained from him and the area around his throne to restore her body. Banjo and Kazooie latter find the machine and use it to restore Jingaling and bring Bottles back to life, despite that it should've only had the life force stored up from when Grunty tried to zap Jingaling the first time around.
- Neverwinter Nights. Consider this situation: the city of Neverwinter has been struck by a plague that can only be cured with specific components from a variety of magical creatures. This is a fantasy world where a powerful mage can teleport stuff easily long-distance. Do they just send the reagents and produce a cure that afternoon? No, they send the creatures themselves; this may be a Justified Trope, because teleporting is expensive, but is Lord Nasher really going to complain about the fees when lives are in danger? This is just the beginning; It gets much, much worse. When the creatures escape from the least defensible region of the structure they're being held in, by teleporting, even if they don't actually have that ability, they disappear into the four main outlying areas of the city. Then, instead of the heroic paladin going out to look for them (using some flimsy excuse about a tracking spell), a weak and inexperienced adventurer is sent out to get them. Complete with a Hand Wave about
Sir Not Appearing In This Filmthe cockatrice being in a box because they didn't actually have a cockatrice monster model. This is all in the first act.
- Gaia Online features many of them, which they often try to fill in later, with mixed results. Here's a small sampling of the ones that haven't been filled in yet.
- During the Halloween 2k5 Story Line, Ian finds a pill bottle that apparently reveals that his romantic rival Gino is hiding a terrible secret from Sasha. Meanwhile, the Mansion is inexplicably lit on fire. We never find out who started the fire, nor what was in those pill bottles.
- During every event held at the Von Helson mansion, there is a spire visitors are forbidden to go to. Upon sneaking in, you see signs of a struggle, though it's never explained as to what has happened there. (Even the revelation that the Von Helsons were vampires was a surprise)
- During the Rejected Olympics event, numerous fantasy races were added to the canon, including Orcs. A subplot involving potential enslavement of the Orcs for manual labor (in a city FULL OF ROBOTS) was set up, then promptly ignored.
- The entire "Robot Rebellion" story line that has been set up ever since Aekea was opened, yet has never materialized.
- In zOMG!, it is stated that all the towns are completely cut off from each other due to things coming to life and attacking people. It's implied that Aekea is fighting off its factory equipment, that all the boats to Isle De Gambino have been closed, and that people attempting to walk to Durem are disappearing. And yet in the Wapanese comic, all of the NP Cs are able to travel from town to town without any issues.
- Mega Man 7 has two different plot holes depending on the version. In the original Mega Man 7, it was stated that Mega Man couldn't kill Dr. Wily due to robotic laws preventing him from harming a human. Why would Wily have to beg down in mercy in all previous games and let Mega Man arrest him in 6? In the American version, Mega Man disregards those laws and tries to kill Wily. There is no explanation why he didn't try to kill Wily in all subsequent games.
- World Of Warcraft...my god the plotholes. Due to so many people working on all the same world's various stories, so many plotholes arose when aliens suddenly started crash-landing on Azeroth, seals on long-dead old Gods started weakening, the Sunwell still existed, Sargeras may still be alive, Khadgar didn't die but suffered a Disney Death, Death Knights gained their will and made a Heel Face Turn to join the horde and the alliance, and more. And with the new expansion announcement drawing near...the amount of plotholes it is rumoured to cause will tear the very fabric of space-time itself around Azeroth where the Maelstrom was and cause all of Azeroth and Outland to be sucked through into an ultra convulted plot no one can possibly understand.
- Khadgar never DID die, a Disney Death or any other kind. Prior to The Burning Crusade, he was last seen entering one of Ner'zhul's portals just before the destruction of Draenor and was never heard from again. Missing in action, sure, but a far cry from a Disney Death.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is full of them. For example, the Russians blame the airport massacre on the Americans, due to the fact that Allen's body was found at the scene. Ignoring the fact that two other Russian terrorists were killed during the massacre, it's hard to believe that the Russians could not identify Makarov from the security footage, much less so when Task Force 141 tracks the origin of a bullet casing by examining microscopic details on it, gathered from security footage.
- It makes a bit more sense when you remember that the Ultranationalists control Russia (which allows them to shift around and lose evidence, should they so wish). Also, Allen was also given a full profile and tattoos to become a Mole, which didn't help in the end.
- Also, why was Captain Price locked up in a gulag anyway? Both he and Soap were rescued by the Loyalists, so how did he end up in an Ultranationalist prison, while Soap was taken back to Britain? And how exactly did Nikolai, by all accounts a political snitch, come into possession of a Pave Low, a C-130, and a Little Bird helicopter?
- The Ultranationalists are implied to have had some major control over the Russian government even before the end of the first game. After all, they are a political party. And as corrupt as Russia is in Real Life, it would be easy enough for an Ultranationalist agent or official to arrange for Price to be shipped to a gulag while he's unconscious as an act of revenge for the killing of Zakhaev. And Nikolai is implied to be a whole lot more than some "political snitch." He is, by all accounts, a Russian-born mercenary. His dialogue in "The Enemy Of My Enemy" more or less confirms this.
- It's worth noting that the gulag actually looks like it is being run by Ultranationalists. Check the uniforms of the "guards" in the lower end of the prison; they're the same as Makarov's goons later on in the game, not the uniforms of the Russian military being fought elsewhere. That helps cement the theory that the Ultranationalists were behind Price's transport to the gulag.
- Which doesn't explain why Makarov supposedly wants this prisoner so badly as their intel suggests. If the prison is being run by the Ultranationalists and he is in charge of them he could just order Price handed to him on a silver platter. The only other explanation is that he deliberately leaked information about Price expecting the special forces teams to go rescue him. Plausible, until you ask yourself exactly how this would benefit him.
- Pokémon: Why can't you just catch a wild Pokémon after it has fainted?
- In Resident Evil 3, depending on the choices you make, Nicholai will sometimes appear at the gas station and be in the room when it explodes, destroying an entire city block. He survives this unscathed, and without any Plot Virus Hand Wave.
Western Animation
- Gargoyles had one in the final episode of the third season. Broadway automatically knew that Angela and Bronx were in jail despite the fact that he had not yet been told about it, and otherwise had no way of knowing about it happening.
- In the 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, the Turtles and April meet the Neutrinos in the Season 1 episode "Hot Rodding Teenagers from Dimension X". In the follow-up Season 2 episode, "Teenagers from Dimension X", the Neutrinos are already acquainted with the Turtles, but are unfamiliar with April despite the fact that she was with the Turtles in the previous episode.
- In the Kim Possible episode "Mind Games," Dr. Drakken swaps bodies with an army official in order to steal a superweapon. Kim and Ron rescue the captured army official, but all three are later captured again - Kim and Ron are tied to a post while the army official is hauled away by Drakken's guards. Later, Drakken decides to kill Kim and Ron with his base's auto-destruct. Not only does Drakken not just shoot them, they are rescued by the army official, who was apparently left in the same room with Kim and Ron without being tied up or anything! Also, he isn't visible in an earlier wide-angle shot of the room.
Web Comics
- Abstract Gender - Eventually, in the comic scripts, it is revealed that the evil corporation kidnapped and experimented on three teenage boys to test out their stuff, because they are evil and this is SCIENCE! Still, makes you wonder. All they really do is swap the genders of people. Why bother with the whole kidnapping teenagers business anyway? I mean, just go to a gay club and offer a complete, no consequence sex change without any of the downsides of the current method for free. Hell, they could even charge and make a profit. Those doors would be filled with applicants from day one, they could perform their operations legally, and they would never have to worry about, you know... KIDNAPPING PEOPLE!
Video Games
- In Kingdom Of Loathing, a plot hole is an item that damages enemies by making them fall into it, and is needed to defeat the best-selling novelist.
- In the fanmade parody campaign "Deus Ex Machina" for Free Space, a plot hole is a physical entity that causes random impossible things to happen. The player gets caught in one early on, and the story just plain stops trying to make even a semblance of sense from there (not that it made a great deal of sense beforehand...)
Web Comics
- Bob And George gleefully lampshades its plot holes, at one point doing a literal Hand Wave. On at least one case it went back and filled a plot hole years after it was made. As an extension of the running joke "There are no plot holes", Bob And George's forums automatically replaced the words 'plot hole' with 'spoon', since There is no spoon.
- In the webcomic "Real Life," a Plot Hole appears as a sort of space-time anomaly which functions as a portal into a blank dimension in which the protagonist has to resolve the current hole in the plot of the Story Arc before they can escape back into "reality." Thus far, the mechanism has only been used once. Said plot hole was eventually tricked into manifesting in a different dimension entirely, with tragic consequences.
- This strip of Badly Drawn Kitties explains a plot hole rather succinctly. In fact, you could say it explains all plot holes rather succinctly.
- This strip of "The Wacky Adventures of Lunar and Kirk" is the first of a series involving a literal hole in the world caused by a plot hole, which will swallow and destroy anyone or anything that enters it.
- The ship in I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space veers dangerously near to a Plot Hole, before they are saved by a hasty (offpage) explanation.
- The Ciem Webcomic Series features a thread here seeking to explain what the author fears may become a serious Plot Hole in the form of Anachronism Stew.
- Acrobat has a villain called Plot Hole, Arch Enemy of Plot Twist. He keeps coming back, after getting killed multiple times, without any explanation and believes that Plot Twist created him
Plot Hole: That's what plot twist does! Creates plot holes!
Web Original
Western Animation
- In the Tiny Toons Made For TV Movie How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Buster and Babs return to Acme Acres via a literal "plot hole." Lampshaded again in a travel episode, where a set of luggage is devoured by Dizzy Devil, but reappears later. Babs pronounces it to be "A plot hole big enough to drive a Mack truck through!" While falling through the plot hole in the movie, Babs says "I had been wondering how those hack writers were going to wrap this up."
- Similarly in The Emperors New Groove, Cronk and Yzma fall into a gigantic pit during a chase scene and yet somehow beat the heroes to their destination. Both of them, when called on this, acknowledge that they have no way to explain how this happened, and Kronk even has a diagram of the enormous (plot) hole they fell into.
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