Plot Hole - Television Tropes & Idioms

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 Time Travel.

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.
- Trunks' sword. Specifically, Future Trunks has the sword even though the events detailing how he acquired it were in a movie that couldn't have happened in Trunks' timeline.
- In the Saiyan Saga, Goku (killed in a Heroic Sacrifice) is wished back to life, and everything is peachy keen. One problem, however; according to the rules of Shenron, once a person has been dead for a year, they cannot be wished back to life, regardless of past accomplishments. So, how is it that a year and a couple of days after Goku dies, he's brought back to life with no problem (other than having through Snake Way again)?
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.

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.
Chuck Austen will never be considered a great X-Men writer, especially in light of The Draco. Besides the sheer WTF-ery of what he did during his run, The Draco introduced Azazel, a demonic-looking mutant trapped in another dimension for thousands of years. He needed somebody to teleport him out, so he was retconned into the place of the lord by whom Mystique had Nightcrawler. Did anybody think to ask Chuck how an extradimensionally-imprisoned mutant did that?
In Marvel Zombies, Luke Cage remarks at one point that he ate Doctor Strange, but yet Doctor Strange appears later in the series unharmed.
- Isn't Dr. Strange a wizard?
- Ms. Marvel was seen dead in one panorama and then showed up later. According to the letters page the first dead Ms. Marvel was an secret identical twin that wore the same costume for no reason and only existed in the Marvel Zombies time line.
- In one issue, Triton is shown having his head destroyed by Cyclops, yet he appears later. Doctor Doom does the same to Dazzler, yet she appears later. Kingpin and Stilt-Man appear as zombies attacking Galactus and Giant-Man mentions that he and the others killed all the zombies there, yet Kingpin and Stilt-Man appear later in the series. So all of these characters have twins in this universe? Gimme a break.
I felt this way when Ralph Dibney discovered that he was being tricked by Faust. It totally came out of the blue. To further drive the point home, he acted like a total jerk!

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.
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 the court? It has never been explained. Archie and other couldn't figure it out for years as well as Mr. One-Two and Co. had 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 a date promise from Handsome Bob. While Johnny somehoe knew that secret all along. Which is twice weird that he didn't tell anyone about Lenny. He at least could've told Archie who was suppose to be his friend.
The Second Terminator has two plot holes. The first is that the laws of Time Travel change so they can include a you can fight fate ending which would create a Time Paradox. This is fixed by just saying Judgment Day was postponed by later movies and TV series. The second and this one is shared with the third Terminator film is that Terminators can not show emotion (both do) and only Living Tissue can time travel. This is why the Terminator has living tissue on it in the first movie, this is ignored in the later movies where two of them are made from Liquid Metal.
- Could possibly be handwaved by them refining the time travel process, but that just leads to more question.s

Literature

The Legend Of Rah And The Muggles has plot holes you could comfortably march the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann through. One notable example is where the titular Marty Stu discovers an Inexplicable Treasure Chest in a cave. For some reason it has his croquet medal on the top, perhaps because croquet is Serious Business in the setting. We never find out for sure, because when he's taken ill with an allergic reaction to the moss in the cave nobody ever goes back for the chest and it's not mentioned again. Perhaps the reason that the moonlight can shine through a cloud that the sunlight can't in the intro is that one of these plot holes is in fact a wormhole with one end on the Moon and the other end hovering somewhere above Muggle-Land. It would make about as much sense as anything else in that book.
A large part of the last couple of books of Terry Goodkind's Sword Of Truth revolves around the protagonist being captured and forced to play in a Ja'La dh Jin tournament. He is driven by the fact that the Emperor, a Complete Monster, has made a promise to award all members of the winning team the woman of their choice - in the protagonist's case, this would be a woman who was captured by the Emperor at the cost of numerous resources and for whom he has particularly brutal revenge in mind. The thought that he might not honour this promise barely even enters the protagonist's mind, despite numerous Aesops in previous books about not being gullible.

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?"
- One episode of Enterprise 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 realized. Except Clyde commands his mom to 'forget everything that happened in this episode'. And then throws away the pendant.
Star Trek The Next Generation:
- The episode "Heart of Glory" featured a Klingon in engineering, threatening to shoot the warp core. This was resolved when he fell through the glass walkway, dying. Why not just transport him out of there and deactivate his weapon mid-transport, as they've done in other episodes (such as The Most Toys)? And why would the walkway be glass instead of transparent aluminum?
- The episode "Cause And Effect" involves a time loop, but regular time passes normally outside the time loop. The mechanics involve a collision between the Enterprise and another ship from 80 years earlier. The crew can barely remember the events of the previous iteration each time. Stopping the warp explosion caused by the collision of the two ships breaks them out, and they are able to return the Bozeman and its non-aged crew to Starfleet. However, there's just one problem. How did the Bozeman timeloop before the explosion? And even if there is a reason, then why don't they just time loop right afterwards?
- The episode "All Good Things..." (series finale) featured a space/time anomaly that expanded backward in time - the earlier in time, the bigger the anomaly, as shown by the three plot threads in the story that occur in different time periods (past, present, future). In the future time period, the anomaly is initially not present, but appears and begins expanding *forward* in time when the Enterprise fires its phasers at the critical location. For consistency, the anomaly should have been present when the ship arrived, then disappeared as soon as they fired their phasers (i.e., expanded backward in time from its start point as the episode states that it does.)
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.

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 begs 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?
- This was actually fixed in a re-release of the game, but it introduced another plot hole. The scan was re-written to indicate that the pirates sensed the presence of Metroid Prime in the crater, but never made contact with it. How, then, did Metroid Prime get the Space Pirate weapons it uses against you in the final battle?
  - Pirates made contact and never returned, thus those in charge of recording information never found out. Thus, they never wrote it down. When the other pirates never came back, they assumed it was Samus who killed them.
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 Film~~the cockatrice being in a box because they didn't actually have a cockatrice monster model. This is all in the first act.
In Odin Sphere, the circumstances surrounding the Three Wise Men's plans to obtain the power of Darkova to revive King Gallon are extremely confusing. Early on Skuldi manages to coerce the Book of Transformation, which apparently allows for the Darkova power, from Velvet, as it had been written by her grandfather. Alright, no problem. The trouble shows up though in that they spent most of the game after that trying to blackmail or trick King Edmund into describing this secret, even though they already had the power themselves. It doesn't get much cleaner from there...
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 Amercan 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.
Suikoden III had one involving the lizard fighter Dupa. In Chris' first chapter, he's seen as one of the 5 representatives of the Grassland clans. However, in Geddoe's first chapter, he's ALSO seen at the Great Hollow before and during Zepon's death, which is supposed to have occured around the same time as the truce negotiations.

Lampshade Hanging

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.

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."
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.
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.