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 Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Plot holes can come in many forms:
Characters suddenly having knowledge that was never passed to them, or vice versa; characters not knowing something they knew last week, or something that anyone in their position must know.
Characters acting completely Out of Character for no explicable reason.
An event does not logically follow from what has gone before.
Characters ignoring or avoiding obvious solutions to their problems.
An event occurring that other details provided in the work simply do not allow.
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 rather easily with really long stories, or ones that take a long time to write.
In comedies, the plot hole may be deliberately induced as the basis for a joke, usually consisting of Lampshade Hanging.note By definition, a plot hole cannot be justified, but if it is used by the author in this way, then it's not a case of bad writing.
Plot holes are thus contradictions in the fictional universe of a story.
There are 3 types of plot holes:
Minor Plot hole: Contradiction created in the story that negatively affects the logic of individual scenes.
Major Plot hole: Contradiction created in the story that negatively affects the logic of main characters.
Super Plot hole: Contradiction created in the story that negatively affects the logic of the entire story and conflicts.
Even unrealistic, fantastical stories can 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 overaren't worth sweating.
Note that a Plot Hole is inherently a contradiction: A Plot element that is merely left unexplained is not a Plot Hole unless its occurrence is impossible according to the setting's rules.
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 Retcon and Continuity Snarl. A Cliffhanger Copout can create a Plot Hole if a Hand Wave is handled poorly. An attempt to resolve or remove a Plot Hole that introduces another Plot Hole is a Voodoo Shark. Contrast What Happened to the Mouse? for potential plots that get dropped...and picked up.
Also see Fridge Logic for cases where a Plot Hole isn't immediately obvious and only becomes visible in hindsight.
This page explains a lot of plots at length, so beware of spoilers.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
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.
When translated into English, it was changed from a standalone series to a sequel to Energon (which was later referred to as such in Japanese materials); 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.
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.
While in prison, Rukia comments that she's been a member of the Kuchiki family for 40 years. A flashback to Renji being made vice-captain also discusses Rukia being a member of the Kuchiki family for 40 years. Then Byakuya reveals why Rukia was adopted: his wife died 50 years ago, leaving him a request to find and adopt her sister as his own. A year after her death, he finds and immediately adopts Rukia. But an immediate adoption a year after Hisana's death would put the adoption at 49 years ago rather than 40 years ago.
It has been revealed that Squad 1 Lieutenant, Chojiro Sasakibe has actually possessed bankai for longer than Ukitake and Kyouraku (two of the oldest captains). Despite this, Ichigo was able to wipe the floor with him when they first met. However, this is justified during the reveal which stated he had made a vow to never fight, even though it damaged his reputation to do so, and that he had never used his bankai in battle until the day he died. In other words, he had the power but he had never used it properly. At the same time, achieving bankai requires a certain level of power, so unless we were meant to assume that his skills had atrophied from disuse, Ichigo taking him out in one punch is a bit inconsistent with how power usually works in Bleach.
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:
There are plot-important revelations about Raoh and Taki's family in season 2 that contradict revelations about their past — with physical evidence — in season 1.
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.
He is also said to have failed the final exams three times (and the exam at the start of the series is his fourth), but is in the same age group as others from his class (who are presumably taking it for the first time). This would mean he must have advanced through the earlier classes much faster than others (notably Sasuke and even Neji) and yet he is called a failure and a dropout.
Further, if he did repeat the classes, he must have been in the same class as Neji, Tenten, and Lee in the previous year, though they do not seem to know him much when they first meet.
Now that it has been confirmed that Both of Naruto's parents died very shortly ater he was born (maybe hours later) this raises the question: From that day to where the story starts, who raised Naruto when he was too young to take care of himself? This is even made further confusing when it is mentioned several times that Naruto was treated like a pariah in his childhood and that people wouldn't even want to go near him.
Naruto's nine-tailed demon fox beast must be 'exorcised' last, not down to a case of numerical order; as numbers 1 to 8 don't need to be harvested in any particular order - no explanation for this has been issued - all seems a case of simple convenience.
For the vast majority of the series it was assumed that if Naruto dies while the Nine-Tails is inside him, the Ninetails will die too. Eventually it's revealed that this is not the case, and the Nine-Tails would simply be revived, presumably without a host. And the Nine-Tails knew this. This raises a lot of questions as to why the Nine-Tails, who despised Naruto for a very long time, would make any attempt at saving his life by giving him his chakra so many times rather than just let him die. You can't assume that the Ninetails actually cared about Naruto either, because the Nine-Tails has made several attempts at taking over Naruto's body to be free.
Features a plot hole the size of a semi in one story arc where a gunman walks down a crowded Japanese thoroughfare, calmly gunning down literally hundreds of innocent bystanders. This scene was very important to the continuation of the plot, but raises one significant question...WHERE THE HELL ARE THE POLICE!?
Especially in comparison to a similar scene later in the series where the bullied Nishi murders his entire class after they threw him out of the window. That got an immediate response from a heavily armed SWAT Team.
Infinite Stratos has one Adaptation Induced Plot Hole at episode 4 when Ichika suddenly knew that Cecilia was in firing range on the unmanned I.S. drone. The Light Novels explains this by Ichika secretly communicating with Cecilia to fire on his command after unleashing Yukihira Type-2 by taking advantage of the barrier nullifying ability of the Laser Blade. Cecilia being frustrated to not be able to help out, answers the call. To people who have never read the Light Novels, it just counts as an Ass Pull.
In the very first episode of Voltron (the lion version), as the five young explorers see the Castle of Lions from their spaceship, Keith details Voltron's backstory and how the witch deceived the robot (or its pilot(s)) and split big V into five robo-lions. Two or three episodes later, when the boys finally make contact with Princess Allura and Koran, the explorers are completely surprised that Voltron cannot be summoned/activated/whatever-they-expected and have to be told everything that Keith explained back in the first episode.
In the twelfth episode of Elfen Lied, Nana gets past the police barricade to reach Mariko's position. She simply arrives there - no explanation given, the barricade not seen in her travels. Kouta and Lucy-as-Nyu arrive to the barricade and find every soldier and policeman knocked out/dead—this is never made clear. Bando is nearby with Kurama, but does not arrive until well after this in the next episode, so Bando's not responsible. Lucy is still Nyu, and remains this again until well after the discovery that the barricade is down. Mariko is by definition at the far opposite end of this barricade, and pulling anything like that would get her blowed up real good. This leaves Nana as the knockout/killer. Except a huge plot point is that Nana does not kill, and with the exception of disabling the vectors (invisible arms) of other Diclonius, she has never shown talent for quietly knocking people out, in either anime or manga. Therefore, no one knocked out or killed the knocked-out/dead force at the barricade.
The anime adaptation of Death Note usually averts the trope when adapting the manga, but probably the only notable example is that it does not reveal SPK member Ill Ratt to be a spy for Mello. As a result, the audience is left without explanation as to how Mello's crew obtained the SPK's true names and were thus able to kill them. The Rewrite 2 special cuts the mafia and has Mikami and Takada kill the SPK instead, but in cutting the mafia and thus fixing one plot hole, it creates another: Soichiro Yagami making the trade for Shinigami Eyes and his subsequent death are also omitted, leaving his absence and Light's knowledge of Mello's true name unexplained.
In Trigun, Vash possesses a special revolver that has a hidden function of grafting to his arm and mutating it into an energy weapon of mass destruction. When Vash tries to stop Knives at the city of July, Knives exerts some control over the gun that forces Vash to destroy the city against his will. The same thing happens decades later in another city, leaving Vash emotionally devastated and fearful of causing more harm. So...why doesn't he just destroy the gun?
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a couple. When the Wolkenritter drain Fate's linker core in A's, she is temporarily rendered incapable of using magic. However, her familiar Arf, who is dependent on Fate's magic for survival, suffers no ill effects. This plot hole was compounded by another one in StrikerS, as the excuse the writers came up with for sidelining Arf was that she didn't want to be a burden to Fate and so was always away from combat in her child form, which requires less mana to sustain. This makes very little sense, because by that time Fate was considerably more powerful than she had been as a child, and she was perfectly capable of supporting Arf then. This makes the plot hole in A's even worse, since when Fate was injured Arf remained in her adult form, despite the fact that it would be placing greater strain on Fate.
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, Ms. Marvel gets killed twice. When questioned about this the writers claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that one was her identical twin sister.
A 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.
In JLA: Act of God there are numerous plot holes and discrepancies throughout the series, none of which are ever resolved or even realized. The black light event is specifically stated to have removed all superpowers while leaving all technology unaffected, but Green Lantern's ring is a completely technological device that is also rendered inoperable and nobody ever mentions the discrepancy. Additionally, on a more fundamental level of the plot, many characters lose abilities that are not superpowers. J'onn J'onzz's many abilities (Shapeshifting, flight, telepathy, Super Strength, intangibility, etc.) are all standard abilities of his natural Martian physiology; yes, they are far beyond any human ability, but a human's ability to see is far beyond that of many animals here on earth and nobody went blind, and no gorilla suddenly lost the ability to lift a large weight, even though their natural physiology is much larger than Homo Sapiens. Like the Martian Manhunter, the powers of the various Kryptonians (Superman, Supergirl), Aquaman and other figures are also natural abilities that are not "super" for their species in any way shape or form, yet they lost them as well. On a different level, it was also stated that the black light event removed all mystical and/or magical people from the world, implying that this is some sort of magical event that they could have dealt with, except Wonder Woman is still here. Wonder Woman's powers are mythological in nature, granted to her by the Greek Gods by way of the Amazons, she is herself a mystical being. The most basic part of the story, the black light event which de-powered the superheroes, is inconsistent, incongruous and illogical, and the characters never even realize it.
The resolution of Transmetropolitan is balanced on a person who disintegrated themselves entirely immediately after performing an assassination being photographed several minutes after the assassination took place. With a camera that, depending on how you read the series's timeline, the photographer may not have owned yet.
Two infamous plot holes from Chuck Austen's run on Uncanny X-Men:
"Holy War": The entire plot centers around Nightcrawler becoming the Pope and faking the Rapture with explosive communion wafers... except that becoming the Pope isn't nearly that easy and Catholics don't believe in the Rapture.
"The Draco": Azazel needs to escape his dimension, so he does so by breeding teleporters to teleport him out... of the dimension he had to escape to breed them in the first place.
Films — Animated
In Tangled, how does Flynn Rider know that Rapunzel is in danger after being told she was taken by her mother? Rapunzel said she was overprotective, but nothing to the point where Flynn could figure out that Mother Gothel was about to get dangerous. He knew this woman had worked with the Stabbington brothers to have them attack him and told them about Rapunzel's magic hair. And then in turn attacked them. It was pretty clear even from what Flynn knew that Rapunzel's mother could not be just a normal overprotective mother getting her daughter back.
The film version of Horton Hears a Who!, Horton crosses a rickety wooden footbridge (the only way to get to Mt. Nool), destroying it in the process. Later in the film, the other characters somehow follow him, despite the bridge being gone.
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?
Handwaved in-story; "Have you ever woken before your alarm, looked around sleepily, and then gone back to sleep to wait for it to go off?" Does this implication of an anthropomorphic sun just raise more questions? Maybe. But if you can accept a talking rooster going off to be a film star.
In Lady and the Tramp, miraculously, when Lady is first introduced as a Christmas present, she doesn't fall limply out of the gift box in need of resuscitation — the gift box has no air holes.
In Beauty and the Beast, a fairy turns the prince into the Beast because, when she knocked at his castle door disguised as an old beggar woman, he turned her away. Given all those servants of his, why is he answering the door? She says that he will remain a Beast unless someone falls in love with him before his 21st birthday. Just exactly how long ago did the curse begin before Belle came into the Beast's life? Lumiere says, "Ten years we've been rusting," yet that would mean the prince was cursed at the age of eleven, which is a bit too young for the "falling in love" escape clause. He looks so much older than that in the painting he slashes after his transformation. But how old would that make Chip at the time of the curse? And doesn't Chip's mother, Mrs. Potts, look and sound a bit past her child-bearing years?
Films — Live-Action
Not surprisingly, there is an entire website dedicated at finding all movie plot holes in Hollywood cinema.
Blood Over Water began shooting in mid-September of 2009. Following events closely, it could not have happened in more than a week. But the characters' clothing betrays rather quickly that it suddenly went from summer to winter in only a week. Essentially, given the background elements that betray the relative time period, any Farmer's Almanac for Big Rapids could call shenanigans on the time stretch caused by trying to represent the passing of a single week over the course of four months.
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.
Battlefield Earth is notorious for containing an alarming number of plot holes, which are quite ridiculous even inside the framework of the story. A few, for the record:
An alien race concerned with nothing but mining the Earth for all its gold deposits has somehow overlooked Fort Knox the whole time they've been on the planet (that's almost 1,000 years, folks).
The human resistance movement is able to defeat the alien overlords with the help of human technology and innovation that's over 1,000 years old, despite the fact that humans 1,000 years ago somehow failed to repel the dreadlocked menace and were supposedly defeated in only nine minutes.
The defeat of the entire alien race depends on accepting a truly batshit and very false concept about radiation being explosive. Technically it's not the radiation that's explosive, it's some of the chemicals in the alien atmosphere that react explosively in the presence of the kind of radiation produced by uranium. Not much better and never explicitly stated in the movie though.
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.
Not to mention the small point that the amount of money they were stealing (assuming that each bill was $100, which wouldn't be likely) would weigh 3,520 lbs and couldn't be carried out by 8 men. Much less, fit into a few briefcases.
In the movie, an EMP was used to black out Vegas temporarily. That's not how those machines work, and the electronics affected would be turned into useless metal (not just offline for a few moments, as in the movie). Planes would fall out of the sky, patients in hospitals would die, and the entire area would be left without electricity/working parts until everything affected was replaced. That means that the plan goes from a utilizing a prank-like power surge to a major terrorist attack costing potentially billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. As for the suggestion that hospitals have backup power, so does casino security. To defeat one you must defeat both.
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.
The Skynet itself. At the end, John realizes that there's no server to destroy, that Skynet has become sentient by distributing itself among virtually every computer in the country. This contradicts the first two films' statements and implications that Skynet is an actual physical computer. The actual core itself is even shown in the Universal Studios attraction based on the Terminator films. (Granted, a theme park ride probably can't be considered canon, but still...)Also, the first film is a predestination paradox wherein the machines' attempts to kill John Connor is what causes him to be conceived in the first piece — (also, though a cut scene was shot, not shown explicitly in the first movie; that sending the T800 back to kill Connor allowed Cyberdyne to create Skynet and the advanced machines in the first place) — But the second movie created a paradox that should have wiped John Connor from the face of existence. T3 fixed the ending of T2 by allowing a way for the war and Skynet to still happen, and John's father can still go back and do what need to be done, but as result sending Terminators back in time to kill certain key players becomes an exercise in futility in itself and they cannot kill anyone before they're destined to die.
Terminator 1 states that Kyle Reese comes from a possible future and the first two films state that the future can be changed. By averting the bad future all the Connors have done in respect to John's existence is create a parallel future which has interacted with theirs.
Depending on how you look at it, the different versions of Skynet may not be a plot hole. The T1 Skynet was an intelligence that emerged from a military computer on an unspecified date, possibly after 8.4.97. Then (from the audience's point of view) the timeline was changed by the introduction of the T1 terminator's CPU. Then the T2 Skynet was created based on the T1 terminator's CPU, coming online on 8.4.97. Then the T1 terminator's CPU was destroyed at the end of T2, preventing the T2 Skynet from being created. Then in T3 another intelligence emerged from a military computer, becoming the T3 Skynet. The differnet versions of Skynet are not plot holes, just the individual versions of Skynet that happened in the original and 2 alternate timelines. The difference between T1 Skynet and T3 Skynet (both based off of military computers) was that (in-story) the T1 Skynet just launched the missiles whereas the T3 Skynet thought to distribute itself before launching and (audience pov) the idea of everything with a microchip being networked was not widespread in 1984.
In Terminator Salvation, Skynet somehow knows Kyle Reese is John Connor's dad. It has no way of knowing this, unless John was somehow dumb enough to spread the information around while fully aware his sworn enemy has access to time travelling robots.
The crew finds out that Kyle Pratt's daughter supposedly died with her father. 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. ** For "The Twist" to work someone would have had to pick up the daughter and carry her to the hiding place. How did no one notice him doing this? For that matter, nobody in nearby seats, except for another child right at the end of the film, ever mentioned seeing the child.
The conspiracy would only work if Kyle got on that specific flight, with Carson as the sky marshal assigned to that flight. Yet she just books tickets on the next available flight. (Just as an aside, the FBI would not be present when the plane lands at Goose Bay, Newfoundland; the RCMP would.)
The Butterfly Effect has several. Time-traveling inconsistencies throughout the story aside... When he's trying to convince someone he is altering the past, he use a trip back in time to give himself injuries sure to leave scars, and instead of the entire time between being rewritten so he always had those scars like every other time, they just magically appear in front of the person he's trying to convince. This also contradicts the idea present throughout (and in the title of) the film that minor changes would alter The Protagonist's life forever - in all other cases, changing a minor detail leads to a completely different future scenario, here, it's exactly the same (ending up in the same prison with the same people and in the exact same situation?).
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.
When Ash escapes from The Pit, as spiked walls close on it. Several minutes later, the monster from the pit climbs out, despite the walls still being closed, and Ash shoots it with his shotgun that he didn't have a few seconds earlier, causing it to fall back into the pit and land in the water below.
In his review of Memento, Roger Ebert wonders, "If the last thing the main character remembers is his wife dying, then how does he remember that he has short-term memory loss?" In actuality, this was a subtle plot point, and Ebert missed the multiple possible explanations hinted at. Leonard has "Remember Sammy Jankis" tattooed somewhere he'll see regularly. Every time he reads it h remembers who Sammy Jankis was (he can still remember things that happened before his injury) and he's able to piece together what's happened to him, even if he forgets that he read it a few minutes later. It's also possible that Leonard is capable of remembering through repetition, just like Sammy does in his story. There's a popular, and plausible, theory that Leonard doesn't even have memory loss at all. He's just deluded himself into thinking he does. Surprisingly enough, people in Real Life with anterograde amnesia are aware of their disability, so this is a plot point that didn't need to be explained in the first place.
A big plot hole occurs at the end of Alone in the Dark (2005). The Xenos (the monsters that Carnby has been fighting for half of the movie) are supposed to be weak against light, but he and Cedrac are attacked by them in broad daylight after they emerge from underground.
The terrorists hold the planes hostage in the air by shutting down the lights at Dulles Airport. Given the amount of time and fuel the planes are depicted as having, they could have easily made it to dozens of other civilian or military airports. Any of the three other airports in the DC area could have warned the airborne planes with their own non-crippled radio system and then the terrorist threat evaporates.
Colonel Stuart's men also have control over all tower operations and radio communications and some instrument readings in what may be a case of Hollywood Hacking. That's how they pancake the plane as proof of their threat. A piece of fridge logic does set in when the other planes don't land after the first crash. Debris on the field?
In Mind Hunters, after repeatedly remarking that the simulation "doesn't feel real" without his gun, Vince pulls out and dramatically cocks a gun and he'd concealed in his wheelchair. All the other characters berate him for this, as they'd been specifically told not to bring weapons. However, just minutes earlier, Nic and LL Cool J's character can clearly be seen bearing handguns as they carry JD's corpse.
In The Fugitive, Helen Kimble clearly tells the 911 operator that "There's someone in my house". As in, an intruder, not her husband. Yet the prosecution fails to notice this, and his defense lawyers fail too as well. At the very least, it would have provided the jury with reasonable doubt.
First of all the band see supposedly live footage of themselves performing in Los Angeles (meant to be their clones). Except the footage being shown is from their Carnival Tour when Paul was still in the band, so none of them comments on why there is a seventh band member onstage or why Jo, Jon and Hannah have extremely different hairstyles from their clone counterparts when they seem them later. And the exact same performance is shown again at the end of the movie, still meant to be a live show.
Second of all the trio that kidnap the clones - Jo, Bradley and Tina - are the ones that find out who Victor Gaughan is and that they were cloned. When the real Jon, Hannah and Rachel get kidnapped Jon says "Gaughan is going to clone us again" when he shouldn't have any idea who Gaughan is or that they've even been cloned in the first place. Later when the whole band meet Gaughan Rachel asks "are you the man who bought the knickers off the internet?" when again, she shouldn't know that. Though if you wanted to, you could suggest that the other three explained to them in the couple of minutes they left the cell to when they were captured again.
To get the clones to revolt, the Bradley clone gives a passionate speech about how great the outside world is...when his only experience of it was the week or so he'd been on tour and kept in careful isolation. While it is shown that the clones get programmed to love what the real band members love, it's unlikely Alistair would give them programming to make them want to rebel. He also mentions boomerangs but the Rachel and Hannah clones had no idea what a boomerang was until they were kidnapped so why should Bradley know? Now if the Rachel, Hannah or Jon clones had given the speech then that would make sense.
When the band kidnaps three of the clones, they do so while shooting a music video and we see the real Hannah and Jon having to improvise the dance routine since they haven't learned it yet. However we see Rachel following it perfectly when she shouldn't know it at all.
Rachel switches with her clone by sitting down in front of a piece of glass, pretending it's a mirror and then copying what the clone does. How the hell did she pull that off? The clones are a bit dim but you'd think they know how a mirror works.
Jo's clone does not appear in the shower scenes (in real life she had a back injury which required for her role to be less physical) but the other clones don't mention where she is, especially since they say Jon must be reported to Alistair for not showering with them.
The band's travel manager Natalie arrives at the end of the film with the police at Eagle Peak. First of all, she was in Spain so how did she get to LA so quickly, or know to get the police? How does she know the band are at Eagle Peak? For her to get there in the space of time the band knew about Eagle Peak she must have teleported from Spain.
Laura's entire escape plan. Safely swimming to shore in conditions that Michael Phelps would have drowned in—dark, bad weather, far from shore. And where she got the money for her escape, her mother's stay at the nursing home, and renting and maintaining the large house she settles into—no part-time library job is going to pay for that. (Hollywood magic money, dontcha know? Also known as the "dream hobby job.")
The thing with the ring. Why be so incredibly stupid that you can't figure out that maybe the ring won't flush? Why be so completely irrational after planning something for so long? And why didn't she CHECK to see if it had washed away? Come to think of it why didn't she tell her swimming partners or teacher that she was planning to run away from her psychotic husband? She could have called them and said "Hey do not tell my batass crazy hubby I took swimming lessons m'kay?" -She was the victim of long-term physical and psychological abuse, and probably believed her husband would kill her and/or her family if she told anyone. Her swim partners would be obligated to call the police, and see the previous sentence for the result if she told. Hence the reason most women don't report abuse.
In Batman Begins, the Big Bad's plot is to disperse a fear drug by lacing the water supply with it and turning all of it to steam at once with a stolen remote microwave, due to it only becoming active when the water is vaporized. Notwithstanding the large amount of water present in every human body (which would boil everyone alive), how come nobody noticed this drug before when they took a hot shower or boiled water while cooking?
Fridge Horror: Maybe people did, and to this day have gone untreated...
In the remake of The Blob, the titular monster can only be harmed by cold. A vehicle that shows up a few times through the film, a snow-maker, is eventually and quite logically the protagonists' best weapon. However, the vehicle also has a snow plow on the front. It projects new snow out in front of it, and then... plows through the snow. Trey Stokes, moderately known for the podcast Down In Front and puppeteer for the creature in the 1988 remake, admitted that the snow-maker exists in this snake-eating-its-own-tail manner specifically because The Protagonists will need it later.
In Fantastic Voyage there's a major plot hole in that the submarine (or the individual molecules which make up the submarine) do not grow back to their original size and gruesomely kill the patient at the end. Neither does the crew member who was killed and left behind. When writing the book, Asimov managed to fix these and some of the other holes. This particular Plot Hole is parodied in a Simpsons episode takeoff where the family has to save Mr. BurnsAt the end, Homer is left behind and does grow back to size living inside Mr. Burns's skin at his full size.
Resident Evil: Afterlife: Alice somehow manages to land her plane on the roof of the prison in downtown Los Angeles, but we see beforehand that it is almost completely out of fuel. She barely even makes it to the roof, and then crash lands on it. Despite seeing this, the characters immediately start demanding that she fly them out of there, and one of them later steals the plane. Where did the fuel come from?
In Spider Man 2, Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock finds Peter with Mary Jane in the cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them. Any normal man would've been killed instantly, and Doc Ock doesn't know that Peter is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would effectively try to kill him. Near the film's climax, Spider-Man asks Harry to tell him the location of Doc Ock's hideout so he can save MJ and the city. Which Harry does. But how did Harry know where Doc Ock's hideout was in the first place? Doc Ock never tells him, and there's no evidence he's been keeping tabs on Ock.
Spider Man 3 has a huge gap of logic. Namely, how in the hell does Eddie Brock/Venom know anything at all about Sandman?! Much less, about how Spider-Man won't let him help his sick daughter?! Readers of the comic may know the symbiote bestows information about Peter to Eddie in his venom costume, giving a reasonable explanation about how he knows about Sandman. Not quote so much about the daughter, though. However, this is not outright stated in the film so newcomers may still be in the dark.
In Star Trek II, Khan immediately recognizes Chekov, even though the ensign wasn't yet apart of the crew when Khan tried to take over the ship in the original series. A common fan theory is that Chekov was part of the crew, but not on the bridge. Walter Koenig joked that he believes Chekov accidentally made Khan wait an uncomfortable amount of time to use the bathroom.
The film series of Harry Potter did its best, with many of the earlier holes due to later books not being released, and to their credit the writers did attempt to mop errors up as best as they could. But there are some that have no real justification.
In Prisoner Of Azkaban Lupin berates Harry for being so careless as to wander the corridors at night with a map that could lead a murderer right to him. Except that it is never explained to either Harry or the audience a) How Lupin knows that the blank piece of parchment is a map b) How Sirius Black would know that it was a map c) Why Harry having the map makes it any more dangerous, as Sirius would have to get to him in order to get the map d) Why Lupin keeping the map makes it safer, as surely it would be an advantage if Harry saw that Sirius was anywhere in the castle grounds he could just run in the opposite direction.
In the film it's never revealed that the map's authors, "Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs," were Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius and James Potter. That would at least have cleared up a couple of these inconsistencies.
"Why Harry having the map makes it any more dangerous" can be explained without knowing the information left out from the book if you assume that Lupin was worried Harry would be careless with the map and leave it lying around where Sirius could find it.
The lack of explanation about the Marauders leads over into all the successive films, as in Goblet of Fire and Order Of The Phoenix Harry refers to Sirius as Padfoot for no apparent reason. The significance of his patronus being a stag and Lily and Snape's being a doe is left unexplained, which also causes Harry's insistence that it was James who saved him and Sirius from the dementors in PoA to look incredibly stupid.
Sirius never gives Harry the two-way mirrors, so in Deathly Hallows the mirror shard appears out of nowhere with no explanation. (Actually he gives him a wrapped package in the fifth book and says "don't open it here.") Sure this is mentioned later, when Aberforth explains that Mundungus stole it and sold it, but anyone who hadn't read the books would probably be hard pressed to remember who that was. Also, what sort of pedlar decides that a broken mirror will fetch a good price? Did he know it was magical? What's the point of a two-way mirror that can only be used when smashed? Why did Harry pick up a random piece of mirror from the Black house? Why does he obsess over it before he sees Aberforth?
The scene explaining the taboo on Voldemort's name in DH is deleted, so it just looks like the trio either have incredibly bad luck, or the Death Eaters are fantastic trackers who don't tell Voldemort where to find Harry and inexplicably go after him themselves, and Xenophilius Lovegood is insane, but happens to have incredible timing.
At the beginning of Deathly Hallows part 1 Tonks tells Harry that she and Lupin are married then says "Everyone, Remus and I"- while touching her stomach, before being interrupted by Moody. Fans of the books will realise she was about to say she's pregnant, but this subject is not broached again until the end of part two when Harry sees Ghost!Lupin right before he is about to die and says "I'm sorry you never got to know your son." Harry has absolutely no frigging way of knowing Lupin had a kid at all. This is a particularly frustrating one as it would have made a hell of a lot more sense if the scriptwriters had allowed Tonks to finish that sentence.
It's minor, but much is made in Order of the Phoenix about being able to see the Thestrals if the person has seen someone die. Yet at the end of Goblet of Fire (after all the events of the book, including the death), Harry gets into carriage and doesn't see the Thestral (it's still invisible to him).
The captor's plan in Nine Dead largely depends on him knowing information that he simply did not possess or had access to. Having presumably witnessed his son's trial and the insurance company's investigation, he should at least know the identities of Kelly, Chan, Eddie, and maybe Jackson (if he was the investigating officer). He could have found out the identity and whereabouts of Coogan based on information his son would have provided him and some additional research. However, he never knew anything about Christian and Sulley's deal, Leon selling the gun to Christian, Christian confessing to Father Francis that he was the real robber, or Kelley and Jackson committing legal fraud, nor could he have known without being omniscient.
In Star Trek (2009) why do they need to drill to the center of a planet to create a black hole? Wouldn't dropping the red matter on the surface work just as well?
It's explained in supplemental material that the energy within a planet's core is what triggers the Red Matter reaction.
Then why does blowing up Spock's ship that carries all the red matter also create a black hole?
Seven Samurai contains a somewhat minor one: what motivates the Bandits into continuously attacking the village when it's clear they're losing quite disastrously and quickly no longer have the numbers to keep it up? The Magnificent Seven, essentially a westernized remake, addresses this; the bandits are starving and actually need food from the village to survive.
There are a few throw-away lines which heavily imply that the bandits are indeed hungry in Seven Samurai, but Japan is not as barren as the Mexican desert and there likely would be another target within range. However, this may be simple Values Dissonance. The bandits are most likely deserters and ronin, unused to the idea of surrender or giving uppity peasants anything other than a merciless end.
In The Princess Bride, when Count Rugen first uses The Machine on Westley, he moves the switch to "1", and we see a block of wood raise about an inch, and water trickle under it. If the block had been raised up all the way, the water would continue to trickle at the same rate, so setting it to 50, as the prince does later, would be no different.
Freddy vs. Jason. Canonically, Springwood is a town in Ohio, and Camp Crystal Lake is in New Jersey. The protagonists drive from one to the other in about an hour.
Alien³. All the Aliens were destroyed in the previous film, and the Queen tore off her ovipositor when she went after Ripley. In this film however there is somehow an Alien egg on board the Sulaco. Actually two of them. Popular fan theories are that the Queen keeps an extra egg stored in some other part of her body for emergencies.
The Cullens move away, and Bella finds their property to be empty. She doesn't hear from them again until she returns home and sees their distinct car in front of her house. Alice has come with grim visions of things to come, revealing that she took the first plane back when she thought Bella was going to kill herself. Taking all of this and the vampires' supernatural speed into account, apparently the car took the same plane as Alice.
In the beginning of New Moon, Jasper goes absolutely apeshit over a papercut on Bella's hand. However, he goes to high school. How in the heck does he avoid smelling blood at school? Kids are bound to fall and scrape themselves/get papercuts/pick old scabs/get bloody noses/any number of ways the human body can bleed, but he never seems bothered by it.
Also, Meyer's explanation for why menstrual blood doesn't attract vampires is totally implausible (she claims it's "dead blood"). It's just as much live blood as the blood running through the jugular vein. Oh, an even larger plot hole is Alice's powers, period. It is repeatedly stated that she can only see the future outcome of someone's decisions — so if someone decides to shoot themselves, she can see it occur. However, she is apparently able to play the stock market with her powers, and in fact, her powers are pretty inconsistent throughout the entire series.
And what about the mere existence of Renesmee Cullen? Meyer states repeatedly throughout the series that vampires are "frozen in time" at the time of their turning; she says female vampires can't get pregnant because their bodies cannot grow or change to accommodate new life, yet Edward can still get it up. Which is completely leaving aside the fact that he has been dead for a century, yet somehow his sperm survived, and he was able to ejaculate. Even if we accept the fact that he can get it up and impregnate Bella with his vamp sperm, how the heck was she not vamped during sex? She was bruised and had fractured bones from the sex, it's implausible that she (being a virgin, by the way) didn't have any vaginal tearing. And considering that Word Of God says that the vampire venom replaces all fluids in a vampire's body, it should have been present in the seminal fluid, so Bella should've been vamped just from the sex. Which would still negate the existence of her demonspawn child.
And the resolution of the novelrelies on a vampire running around and spawning half-vampire children on a regular basis!
When Bella and Alice arrive in Italy near the end of New Moon, Alice runs off to steal a car and comes back with a bright yellow Porsche. Questions like "who leaves a Porsche sitting in an airport parking lot?" can be ignored in the face of a real big problem. How did a vampire manage to steal a car in broad daylight? This can't even be Handwaved away by saying it might still have been nighttime, since it's mentioned the that the sun was rising only a few paragraphs earlier.
In And Then There Were None, Judge Wargrave successfully fakes his own death with the help of Dr. Armstrong. Armstrong waves everyone else to keep back as he examines the "corpse" and pronounces him dead. So far so good... but then several people carry Wargrave upstairs.
Marie Michon, the "seamstress" in Tours, signs her name as "Aglaé Michon" in one of her letters. Of course, this could be some kind of code, but it's never explained.
In the Discworld novel Feet of Clay, Pterry introduces golems to the reader by having Angua have to explain them to Cheery, who had never seen one before. However, the final piece of the mystery was solved when Cheery offhandedly mentions that golems were so ubiquitous in the city that no one notices them, even in the Alchemist's Guild where she used to work, where they tended to get coated with the chemicals they used to handle.
In Order of the Phoenix, Harry and Hermione take seats in the back row of the Quidditch stadium. A moment later Hagrid approaches them coming through the rows behind them, because how?
In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Hermione deduces that the Basilisk must be moving around in the pipes and that's why Harry can hear sounds from the walls. Fair Enough. So how does the Basilisk come out of the pipes to attack it's victims? Assuming it's in the drain pipes rather than in the water supply , there is no reason for a drain that big to be there in any bathroom, let alone any of the places where the attacks happened.
The Marauders Map creates a huge plot hole. Somehow Fred and George Weasley fail to notice for two years that there is someone named Peter Pettigrew in their brother Ron's dorm every night...
The circumstances of Snape's eavesdropping on the Prophecy. According to the Book 5 Snape only heard the first sentence of the Prophecy and then was discovered and thrown out. In the next book Trelawny (the seer who delivered the Prophecy) reveals that they met that day and he even made some excuses for eavesdropping. But that could only be possible if he stayed there for the whole duration of the Prophecy, since a seer is out during the process and doesn't remember it afterwards.
In the case of Dead Souls just because parts of the second half of the novel are literally missing, since Gogol originally wanted to destroy the whole text. Sadly, the complete story is now Lost Forever.
As a child, Amir writes a story about a man who cries pearls. The man in the story isn't weepy by nature, and has to do increasingly horrific things to make himself cry. At the end of the story he's murdered his wife. The servant, Hassan, points out that the man could have just cut onions instead, and Amir is shocked that even uneducated and illiterate servants can know about things like plot holes.
The disbelief stems more from the idea that Hassan thought of something he didn't, meaning a servant had outsmarted him. Given that he's just a child, and has presumably been told or understood that servants were dumber than their masters, to excuse classism, it's only natural that he was confused by this.
In Death: Here's a big one...the story Glory In Death has Roarke killing off Morse to save Eve and Nadine's lives at the end. However, Immortal In Death, the book that comes after, has Eve and Nadine talking about Morse is going to be put on trial and that Morse was not insane. How do you put a dead person on trial?
In Mass Effect Retribution, Kahlee Sanders mentions never hearing of the Reapers before, despite a major plot point of the previous book involving her discussing the Reapers with the quarian Admiralty Board.
In Eragon, when Brom dies he gives Eragon seven words that he should only use when he is in the greatest need of them, but throughout the last three books, there is no mention of the words. It was highly speculated that these words would come into play in Inheritance, but they were nowhere to be found. However, there is a possibility that Christopher Paolini is saving them for later books, as he intends to write more in the world of Alagaesia, but unless those books are actually about the character of Eragon, it is more likely that it is a plot hole.
Clearly it's both possible and desirable for the Buggers to relocate a queen off the home world, since one is in the ship Mazer Rackham destroyed in the Second Invasion. So explain why all the queens are on the home world? Especially when they see the invasion coming enough to ship out an egg. How about a few queens instead?
Considering that they knew the mind of the person who would be their executioner, they probably thought it futile. Ender Wiggin is scary when he's focused on something, and that doesn't change throughout the series, despite his taking three thousand years in order to atone for his "sin".
This hole is closed in one of the sequels, where it is revealed that the Buggers gathered their queens as a form of mass suicide, in a combination of knowing that the humans would never accept a peace with them and the hope of Redemption Equals Death that would allow them to make amends for the humans that they killed.
As pointed out in a certain Warrior CatsAbridge series Yellowfang had no idea about the Dark Forests' plans to destroy the clans, despite her telling Jayfeather about it in the previous book.
A minor one in The Fear Index but it turns out all of the events of the book were manipulated by a computer program. So how did the computer manage to stick a bookmark into the online ordered book it sent to Alex? It couldn't have been an instruction as we see the email and it makes no mention of it.
Dominator somehow manages not to know the Lady's (who just happens to be his wife) name and keeps guessing it (incorrectly) throughout the first books;
After The Lady loses her powers, all her Taken immediatly die; however, after Dominator's soul gets sealed in a silver spike and it is acknowledged by characters that he can no longer project his will onto the world, the old Taken (created by Dominator) continue functioning perfectly;
Even though Lady knows True Names of Howler, Shapeshifter and Soulcatcher, she never uses them, even though doing so would solve literally every single Company's problem. This problem gets acknowledged once, when she is still De-Powered and Goblin says that she won't ever tell him or One-Eye True Names of their enemies. After she gets her powers back... Well, she still does nothing. And gets sealed under the glittering plain, along with the majority of the Company for her troubles.
In Upper Fourth at Malory Towers, Gwendoline tells Clarissa about how Ellen tried to cheat by finding the exam papers and reading the questions in Second Form; however, there is no way Gwendoline could have known about this because Ellen was caught by Darrell, and she and Miss Grayling decided that the rest of the class needn't know about what Ellen had tried to do. Unless Gwendoline was eavesdropping on the two of them back then, this makes no sense whatsoever.
Live-Action TV
Played for laughs in Monty Python's Cycling Tour, where the protagonist was hauled before a firing squad three times for execution. The first two times, the firing squad misses the target. The third time the squad charges at the protagonist and tries to skewer him with their bayonets. A grey screen with the words "Scene Missing" then appears. The next scene shows the protagonist free outside the prison saying "What an amazing escape!"
In one eppy, a recruit spots a plot hole in a training exercise. A recruit is part of a bunch of recent Air Force graduates training for a role in the Stargate program. Part of a training exercise requires that they have no backup from SG-1 because SG-1 was caught in an ambush attack by a small number of Jaffa and called for backup; the recruit notes that SG-1 is too elite to be held down by a small number of Jaffa, and if it was an ambush attack, they wouldn't have had time to call in for backup. Later on, Sam remarks to Jack, "He's right, you know."
A later episode, "48 Hours", had the SGC go through a variety of political wrangling with the Russians so they could borrow the DHD they'd used in their own abortive stargate program. The writers apparently forgot that the Americans already had the DHD found with the Beta Gate in Antarctica. The next season's episode "Frozen" patched the hole by explaining offhand that the Beta DHD ran out of power a few days after they got it back from the NID.
In several episodes (all five seasons, actually) of Stargate Atlantis, a recurrent plot hole is the inability to use systems on Atlantis because of the lack of sufficient power because of the lack of ZP Ms. This makes little sense as 1. There are no backup power systems on Atlantis at all? and 2. Where are the facilities on Atlantis to make new ones? As fast as even new ZP Ms were depleted in use, there would have had to be a way to make them with relative ease, and 3. Given their access to the Ancient's database, after discovering that Atlantis had no primary, secondary, tertiary or quaternary power backups at all, unlike modern spacecraft that have multiple redundancies in every important system, McKay and Zelenka would have looked up fusion power generator designs in the database and starting building them using the incredibly advanced fabrication facilities on Atlantis and the ready supply of hydrogen from the ocean's water. While not as compact as a ZPM, fusion could have met the power needs of the city without difficulty.
The crew 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 filmStar Trek: First Contact. The pieces of a crashed Borg sphere are discovered in Antarctica. The crew see and fight assimilated crewmen on an alien freighter. The ship's doctor, Phlox, is infected with nanoprobes (but manages to cure himself). 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?"
In Voyager we learn that well before the Enterprise-D encountered the Borg, Starfleet sent a scout craft to investigate them in their home territory. This goes somewhat badly, as Seven Of Nine can attest, since that's how she got assimilated. This means Starfleet knew a fair bit about the Borg...and didn't tell the commander of their flagship (not even with an automated, Captain's-Eyes-Only warning upon detection of their technology on sensors, a function Voyager used as a plot device at one point), or have any plans on the go for dealing with them when they inevitably came calling.
In the first episode encountering the Borg, we learn that the Borg had destroyed the homeworld of Guinan's people, the El-Aurians. We see the surviving refugees arrive at Earth in transport ships during the opening of Star Trek: Generations. Again, it appears that the Federation never bothered to find out what they were running from, even though it was clear Guinan already knew their name, tactics, etc.
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 80 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.
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?
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 a really weird example, Kirk suddenly knows at the end of "And The Children Shall Lead" that the Sufficiently Advanced Alien of the week is called "the Gorgon". This was not only never mentioned in front of Kirk, it was not mentioned previously in the episode at all.
It's kind of weird how the Horta have named themselves in "The Devil in the Dark", even though the Horta don't have mouths, so they could not possibly say the name of their race if they even had a name.
Episode "Chris Crossed" brings a ton of them up. First of all Chris's hair is long in the flashbacks when it was short when he first appeared at the end of Season 5, as well as his clothes being different. Second of all, the flashback shows Chris going through a portal in the attic when he orbed into the attic in his first episode. And when he first appeared, he says he has come to stop the Titans as they rule the world in his future. Yet the flashbacks have no mention of the Titans.
He also mentions that Paige was killed by the Titans yet in a later episode he says he goes to her for money in the future.
He could have, you know, LIED about the Titans thing as an excuse on why he came back, since the real reason would be complicated and likely scare the crap out of them. A real Plot hole in the Chris plot is the whole Valhala thing. Why did he send Leo to Valhala in the first place? It's what caused Leo and Piper's temporary breakup which Nearly stops them from doing the dirty and concieving him. It's like he wanted to make his mission as dificult as possible.
A lot of stuff in later Charmed was like this, since they were often implied that they had always been there, and the Charmed Ones really should have seen them already, prompting fan reactions of "Where the hell were they before?!" Two examples:
The Cleaners: Magical entities that were supposed to erase incidents and people that exposed magic to the real world. They were severely disliked because there were multiple incidents of magic being exposed that they never acted during, such as the exposure that resulted in Prue dying.
Magic School: This one really bugged people since it would have greatly helped the Charmed Ones when they were still learning their abilities. It's designed for children, sure, but considering they were the Chosen Ones, they could all any help they could get.
The last season introduces a new form of Super-Vampire called the Turokhan. Turokhans have the same weaknesses as regular vampires. They die by a wooden stake in the heart, or decapitation, or sunlight. But their strengths are massively amplified, to the point that the highly experienced and strong Buffy Summers is unable to drive a stake deep enough through the Turokahn's super tough and thick skin to pierce its heart. A vicious, brutal, lopsided beatdown of curbstomp proportions ensues. Later Buffy is only able to kill this one Turokhan by luring him to a battlefield of her choosing where, after a lengthy battle she finally manages to decapitate him using razor wire. So, clearly the Turokhan are insanely tough right? This was the point. Cue the inverse law of Ninjas. In the final episodes Buffy and her squad of newly activated rookie slayers proceed to casually and effortlessly dust Turokhans left and right. Upstairs, the purely human (but fairly badass by human standards) Robin Wood is also effortlessly killing every Turokhan that comes near him with a simple metal knife to the chest. Nerdy little Andrew and clueless Anya (also both human, and considerably less combat-capable than Robin) are also effortlessly killing Turokhans. Anya kills one with a glancing blow from her sword to the hip. Word Of God acknowledges the inconsistency, but says that the story of empowerment is more important than continuity here
Interestingly enough, there is a plausible in universe reason for why the other Turok Han were weaker that Joss didn't think of. In Season 4 of Angel it's revealed that Vampires can't die by starving to death but they do become incredibly weak and addled after lengthy periods without feeding. The Turok Han that made it into Sunnydale had the chance to feed, the ones under the seal presumably hadn't fed in centuries since they were the only creatures in there.
Towards the end of Season 1 of Sons Of Anarchy, the Cowboy Cop ATF Agent Stahl attempts to fracture the charter by setting up Opie to look like he's gone into witness protection. She then cuts Opie loose because she doesn't have enough to hold him, but bugs his phone and car on the chance that he says something incriminating. SAMCRO has every reason to believe that Opie's the snitch and of course they do believe this, which is confirmed in their minds when they find the bugs. Now at this point, the Cops and ATF know that A) either SAMCRO or Opie himself discovered the bugs and destroyed them- in either case they are not going to produce any evidence, B) SAMCRO is extremely likely to murder Opie as a result of their little trick, and C) in 24 hours, the US Attorney will reveal his case, charging Opie and proving that he is not the snitch. Hale, the Fair Cop, is torn up about what to do - reasoning that if he tells SAMCRO that Opie is not the snitch, he is leaking classified information. But all he needs to do is keep him safe for one night, and the answer should be staring him in the face: arrest Opie on a trumped-up charge (which is hardly as bad as the crap they pulled to get to this point) and keep him off the streets for 24 hours. The truth comes out the very next day. But he dithers so long that Opie's wife is murdered in a botched hit because he was Acquitted Too Late, setting off the events of Season 2.
A rather small one appears in 24 season 4, episode 9. Dina agrees to tell CTU all she knows if they can guarantee her son's safety. The son then tells his father, who is attempting to kill him, that if he kills him his mother will tell CTU everything because she cares about his safety. Does not compute!
In the Mad About You episode "The Caper", several different couples go into the Buckmans' neighbor's apartment to fetch food. Each couple, when they return, comments on the neighbor's gorgeous painting. When the painting goes missing, each couple in turn is accused of having stolen it while they were fetching the food — despite the fact that the later couples reported it was still there when they saw it.
While both Peter and Sylar were in those medical comas, there comes the issue that in season 1 the room Sylar was kept in seemed to dampen abilities (if the Haitian/Renee was there the whole time he would've stopped Eden), whereas in season 2 Peter needs to take pills to dampen abilities, and in season three there's early on the drug induced comas
Also how when Sylar takes Elle's ability, he doesn't need to kill her. Presumably because he gains abilities through understanding how people work, and he understands Elle. Later he says that this was because he didn't need to cut people's heads open to take their powers anymore. Yet he still...acts like he does, can't take Matt's power like this, or what's his face with the puppet master ability in the fourth season finale. It is explained that he can obtain powers through empathy, like Peter could. It's just that as a psychopath, empathy is difficult for him, whereas it's second nature to Peter.
In Volume 2, it's revealed that Adam Monroe injecting his healing blood into Peter also 'cures' his Haitian-induced memory loss. However, Peter already has that ability, and used it to heal himself after being shot in Ireland. Why didn't this restore his memory?
Furthermore, in Volume 1 HRG sends the Haitian to wipe Claire's memory. He doesn't, but what we know about Adam would imply it would have been impossible anyway. This could be explained away by saying that HRG and or the Haitian didn't know this, but considering they've both been working for the Company for decades and have had Adam Monroe as a prisoner all that time, it seems unlikely that they'd never tried to erase his memory.
At the end of Book II, Orry Main finds his wife, Madeline, whom he hasn't seen for more than two years. When he finally finds her, he sees his baby for the first time. Madeline had been pregnant with Orry's baby when she disappeared over two years ago, but when Orry meets his baby, the baby is only about six months old. This becomes more noticable when Charles Main, Orry's cousin, makes it back to Augusta's house for the first time in two months. When he gets there, Washington informs him that Augusta is dead, but that she had died giving birth to Charles' baby. When Charles had seen her two months prior to this, she wasn't showing the least bit of being pregnant. When Charles meets his baby, the baby looks to be two years old or older even though it couldn't have been more than two months old within the timeline.
The drummer boy who hangs out with Billy Hazard spends a few years with Billy's unit, but he doesn't age at all.
At one point, Billy Hazard leaves his unit so he can go check on Ashton. He reasons with himself that he'll be back before his unit will see combat again, then stays gone for eight months. When he returns, sure enough, his unit hasn't been called into combat in his absence.
In the classic Hancock's Half Hour TV episode "The Bowmans" the Hancock character causes chaos on the set of a BBC radio Soap Opera when he refuses to follow direction or stick to the script - so much so that he is eventually fired and his soap character killed off. It's only when Hancock starts receiving large sacks of sympathy mail two weeks later that he realises the show was pre-recorded and his death scene has only just been broadcast. But (as one of Hancock's biographers has pointed out), if the show was taped then most of Hancock's ad-libbing could have been cut out in the first place.
Professional Wrestling
Edge and Christian being portrayed as brothers, then later as childhood friends.
Kane has has several plot holes. One of them is his involvement in the infamous "Katie Vick" storyline. Apparently, Kane was partying, drinking, and driving with his girlfriend, Katie Vick, despite that his character was supposed to have been secluded from society during that time.
Speaking of Kane, his hair is a plot hole. Before his "official" unmasking, Kane has had his mask removed on a few occasions, albeit the hair grown from his head is covering his face. On the night of his "official" unmasking, Kane takes off his mask that has a wig attached, which is used to cover the little hair on his head that remained from the fire that burned him as a child. Another thing to note is that Evolution took off Kane's mask five months prior to his "official" unmasking, and yet Kane still had a full head of hair when he had his mask taken off.
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.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar featured a pretty big one: just before Caesar was assassinated, a random person is shown writing a letter to Caesar about the treachery of his senate - who this man is, how he knows about the treachery, and why he knows every single person involved in the plot is never told - it turns out to be irrelevant, however, as he never delivers the letter anyway.
The plot hole does not look quite so big when you consider that historians estimate that the conspiracy involved about 50 to 80 persons (while the letter in Shakespeare's play names a mere eight), which provides any number of suspects - Artemidorus could either have been one of them who betrayed the others, or one of the conspirators took him into their confidence in the mistaken assumption he could be trusted.
Video Games
In Metroid Prime, the eponymous 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 MacGuffinFetch Quest to remove the seal? The EU version and the Trilogy version fixed this plot hole: In those, the Space Pirates merely detects a creature inside the crater and wastes a lot of time and effort trying to break the seal and failing. They never actually find Metroid Prime. Though now it has all those beam weapons/vulnerabilities just because.
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 heroicpaladin 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 the cockatrice being in a box because they didn't actually have a cockatrice monster model. This is all in the first act.
No excuse is ever given for Neverwinter not simply requesting new creatures (or rather, the parts from said creatures) from various other cities and have them teleported there immediately. None of the creatures are unique specimens.
Retcons the protagonist's childhood so that their mother was a priestess of Bhaal who belonged to a cult that was trying to sacrifice Bhaalspawn children to effect his resurrection. This ceases to make sense when you try to figure out the timeline: The game takes place in the year 1369 and the protagonist is twenty years old at the beginning of the first game a year earlier and was an infant when the cult was active. But Bhaal, who had sired his mortal children to be fuel for his eventual resurrection after his foreseen death, died in 1358. So in fact the evil cult was trying to sacrifice the children while he was still alive, which at the very least would mean they had misunderstood his plans very badly.
More to the point, the flashback also reveals that the protagonist was apparently conceived during the Time of Troubles, which also happened in 1358. So the main character suddenly is ten years old?
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 NPCs 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, 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 for 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.
In Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, 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.
In the first God Of War the gods send Kratos to find Pandora's Box, open it, absorb the power to kill a god within, and kill Ares. This he does. In the last game Kratos is trying to find the box, open it, absorb the power to kill a god within, and kill Zeus. He accomplishes the first two steps, only to discover that duh, he already did step three. What, did everyone think it just didn't take the first time, especially given that he's been killing gods left and right ever since? Furthermore, Zeus makes it clear that the box, which contained both the evils of the Titan's war which corrupted the gods and the power to kill him, was never supposed to have been opened in the first place. So why did he ever help Kratos reach it?
In Tower Of Heaven the The Book of laws states you shall not touch golden blocks, but when the book shatters and all laws are nullified, golden blocks still kill you. Retconned in the flash version which changes them to skull blocks.
Once you retrieve the G.E.C.K. in Vault 87, you are ambushed and captured by Enclave troops before you get out. Problem is, the main door of Vault 87 is broken and surrounded by deadly radiation, so the only way in is the back door through Little Lamplight. But the residents of Little Lamplight wouldn't have let the Enclave troops in, and there's nothing to suggest the Enclave forced their way through.
The main door is still broken and sealed... come to think of it, how do the Super Mutants get out?
There's one very glaring plot hole in Agarest Senki 2 that's found at the beginning of the game, however it won't be much a plot hole until you do a New Game Plus. At the beginning of the game, Aina heals Weiss from his injuries after getting blown off somewhere from where he and Fasti were at. Not much of a big deal right? Play through the game until The Reveal shows up and wonder if Weiss didn't kill Chaos and was stabbed by Fasti, to stab Chaos, then how come Weiss doesn't have a tear on his shirt back and front? Unless somehow Chaos hijacked Weiss' body and male shirts can magically heal, or that Chaos copied Weiss and his clothes while the real Weiss got disintegrated from the blast of the explosion, the world may never know.
Too many to list in The3rd Birthday to the point of Mind Screw. It just raises more questions than answers by the end of the game.
In Gears of War, the Kryll are a swarm of flying piranhas that savagely attack anything that falls into darkness and consumes them in seconds. This is true of human and locust alike, only General RAAM can walk amongst Kryll without any damage and his means for doing this are never explained. In the DLC campaign "RAAM's Shadow" for 3 (chronologically earlier), normal Locust walk among Kryll just fine and indeed even RAAM's lieutenants are able to command the Kryll.
In the Dragon Ball anime and manga, Goku punishes Monster Rabbit for turning Bulma into a carrot and his two decorated mooks by using his Power Pole to send them to the moon, where they must make treats for a year. Eight months later, it gets blown up by Master Roshi. However, the video games state Monster Rabbit and his cohorts got off the rock and back to Earth beforehand... which gives way to the plot hole: HOW?!?
There are many plot holes in the Jak and Daxter series, most of them induced by Sig. Being a friend of the titular heroes, working for Krew and being a spy for Damas should give him a hell of a lot of information about everything, but somehow he never puts two and two together. The most egregious example is about Jak's relation to Damas: Sig was sent to Haven to look for Damas's son Mar. The Kid carries the seal of Mar around his neck that indicates he might be the lost heir to the throne. Damas, of the House of Mar, was Haven's ruler before he was cast out. Logically, Sig should at least suspect that the Kid might be related to Damas, but doesn't. It gets worse when it turns out the Kid is Jak, who from that point on carries the Kid's seal with him, and people on occasion use it to remind him who he is.
Neverwinter Nights 2 takes some Artistic License with the rules of magic in the Forgotten Realms setting. No less than three divine spellcasters lack patron deities. Some D&D settings allow this, but FR is not among them. Zhjaeve can be handwaved as venerating the githzerai god-king Zerthimon, and Gannayev-of-Dreams puts his faith in the spirits of the land, but Bishop has no plausible excuse, especially since the one explanation that would allow itspecifically, that one of the gods, Malar perhaps, has chosen to grant him spells without direct worship is invalidated by what becomes of his soul in Mask of the Betrayer.
Heavy Rain has a huge glaring problem: the nature of Ethan's blackouts are never explained, despite the blackouts being the sole reason why the police were after Ethan. Not only this, the blackouts contained knowledge about the Origami Killer Ethan couldn't possibly have, such as the faces of victims he's never met. In a deleted scenes montage, Word of God stated that the Origami Killer and Ethan developed a telepathic link at the start of the game when the killer witnessed Ethan risking his life for his son. After some consideration, they figured that the plot hole was better than that explanation. They were right.
In Persona 4 Arena, none of the characters from Persona 4 have upgraded personas. This is largely understandable as the characters gaining their ultimate personas is by maxing out their social links which, in the [[Persona4 previous game]], is optional. However, there is one exception, Teddie's social link progresses automatically with the story, which results in his persona transforming from Kintoki-Doji into Kamui. However, like the rest of the investigation team, he uses his original persona and his ultimate persona is never even mentioned.
Nino Kuni has several irritating plotholes. One of them appears early in the game when Olliver goes back to our world. People from our world cannot see nor hear people from the other world, so when Olliver asks a lady for the information he needs and right in the middle of the conversation starts to talk with his friendly magical fairy, the lady doesn't even lift an eyebrow or gets surprised of the fact that a kid who just lost his mom a while ago is talking to himself all of a sudden. Even worse, she carries on with the conversation as if nothing happened. This rule of "nobody can see magic or people from the other world" gets violated every once in a while as the character do not even care about the consequences of using magic or talking to somebody that cannot be seen by others. Another example of this is when the characters use a spell to go from one world to another in the middle of the street and nobody wonders how or why that kid vanished into thin air.
There is more problems with the gateway spell than that. Apparently the first time you use it you are told that you need a large space in order to cast the gateway spell, the one that will allow you to travel through worlds, so the characters go to the town square, summon a Cool Gate, and use it to go the other magical world. Afterwards this rule of "can only be casted in large spaces" is just ignored, as you can cast it anywhere, and the gate is nowhere to be seen anymore. No explanation given, of course.
An even major example comes later in the game. The characters go back to Al Mamoon so they can ask for an audience with the Cowlipha to get a permit to use a ship. The Cowlipha is apparently brokenhearted and her heart lacks restraint, so the characters are told to go wander the city asking in every shop for somebody with a lot of restraint to spare. Now, the plothole comes because the locket, the object used to stock pieces of heart, glows when somebody having some quality to spare from his heart is near. The game decided to just break that rule in this particular moment and have you wander around town aimlessly looking for something as vague as "somebody with a lot of restraint" when the person that you were looking for was none other that the Cowlipha's servant, the person who asked you for help, accompanied you through all this miniquest, and was even present when you discovered that she was brokenhearted and needed restraint. During all this the locket didn't shine even once.
Webcomics
Demolition Squad either is full of these, or the whole plot simply doesn't make any sense at all.. heavily lampshaded by Nadine
Dangerously Chloe hasn't been online very long, but it seems to specialise in these, not least that Teddy and his sister Abbie apparently don't recognise Chloe, despite having met her three years before
Life With Lamarr has Eli create the Free Children's Commune after the Black Mesa incident. However in Dr. Breen's backstory he was raised at the Free Children's Commune before becoming head of Black Mesa and causing the Black Mesa incident.
APT Comic uses these in a very literal way, you can access them by defying currently-existing canon (like the other Plot Hole definition) and pull stuff out at the cost of "Plothole Fairy Points."
Peter accidentally sets fire to the pediatric wing of a hospital while trying to impress his boss in order to get a promotion. Later, his boss puts his name down for consideration for an executive position. Later still, after Peter has graduated from the third grade in order to qualify for the position, his boss points out that there is no way he's getting the job because he set fire to a hospital, killing 19 children. She doesn't explain why she considered him for the position in the first place. The problem with Family Guy is that sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a plot hole or part of the joke.
Speaking of Family Guy... it's generally best to assume that none of the cutaway gags ever happened. They all directly contradict the plot and each other, and make no effort to avoid this.
Another interesting one is that Brian Griffin remains an atheist despite having dinner with Jesus, who then proceeds to perform miracles at the table. In another episode, Peter becomes worshiped by a group of fanatics believing he has healing powers after a lie he told. This leads to God cursing the Griffins with plagues. When Peter says that there has to be an explanation for the events, Brian replies, "God is pissed".
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.
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.
A truly baffling one happens in the Vacation in Europe side season. In the first episode, Shredder and the Turtles run into each other in France, and fight on top of the Eifel Tower. In the next episode, the Turtles are still in France, and not only do they talk about going to see the Eifel Tower, Shredder is shocked when he learns they're in France. It almost seems like two season opening episodes were made seperately.
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.
Winx Club: When we last see the Trix in Season 2, they are stuck in the Realix realm, yet at the beginning of Season 3 they have somehow been arrested and dropped off in the Omega dimension.
Galtar and the Golden Lance: The eponymous weapon can only be used by Galtar (the show's continuity is pretty loose, but this has been the rule from Day 1), because he's the champion of all things Good...until someone breaks the rule. No, not one of the good guys. Rava, of all people.
Danny always seems to forget his ghost ability to become intangible when he is being attacked.
It is explained early on that Danny was inexperienced and would forget to go intangible. He even mocked himself once for forgetting. This frequent plot hole is actually lampshaded in the episode My Brother's Keeper.
In Bitter Reunions, Danny knows the name of Vlad's ghost persona despite the fact he wasn't previously told.
The season finale, Phantom Planet, leaves many of these due to being rather poorly written. When Danny reveals his true identity to the world at the end, Valerie just stands there and claps like everyone else. She just found out that the boy she has feelings for is actually someone she despises more than anything else. How does she see him? We'll never know. Vlad also acts completely out of character in this episode (and pretty much the entire third season, for that matter).
The dev team was expecting to get another season to explain things but didn't, which forced them to leave a fair number of plot threads unfinished and presumably meant that they had to rush the finale out.
In the 200th episode of South Park, Stan says that he met Muhammad once, referencing the episode "Super Best Friends". In another episode "All About The Mormons", he does not know who Joseph Smith is despite the fact that he met him earlier in the same episode. Why would he remember Muhammad, but not Joseph Smith?
This IS a Long Runner show, so it's kinda easy to forget some things.
Filmations Ghostbusters was well-known for structuring episodes based around an Aesop, but "The Girl Who Cried Vampire" is a case where the moral of the week results in a plot hole: in the story, a girl named Kita wants to have some fun, so she uses her ghost-like Scarecrow Balloons to attract the GB's attention. Here's the problem: the balloons trigger their Ghost Alarms even though they're not ghosts! And nobody thinks to question it!
One of the many challenges of Xiaolin Showdown ended with Jack losing but not giving up the Wu he had bet, neither he nor Omi seem to notice this.
Voltron Force- Larmina (a teenager) is stated to be Allura's niece. But in the original Voltron, Allura is an only child. Not only that, but not enough time has passed (only around 7 years at the very most) for Romelle (Allura's cousin) and Sven to have a teenage daughter. So who in the world are Larmina's parents? Being royalty and without heirs it is possible that Larmina is the daughter of a distant relative of Allura
Redakai: Despite having had a rather heated argument over common sense, the heroes automatically assume that the Face Heel Turn of their comrade Maya is due to mind control (And not coercion, a clever plan of subterfuge, actual feelings of betrayal, or even just to teach them a lesson about how big jerks they are). Not only that, but they can tell who applied it and with what even though they did not witness the encounter nor have any recording of it.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars in the Season 3 episode "Assasin" Aurra Sing was arrested for attemping to murder Padmé, and it's quickly discovered, that it was Ziro the Hutt who hired her for the job, because he wanted to get even with Padmé, for putting him in jail. This created two huge plotholes. A) How did Ziro hire a wanted Bounty Hunter, while in prison? Made even weirder by one of Ahsoka's earlier visions, which showed Aurra personally talking with the Hutt. Uhmm..how did she get in the prison to talk to him? B) In the Season 1 finale "Hostage Crisis' Ziro was broken out of prison by a group of Bounty Hunters, Sing included. Since in "Assasin" Ziro was still in prison, it's obviously takes places prior to "Hostage Crisis". However Sing was arrested in "Assasin"...How did she get out by "Hostage Crisis"? This latter had been adressed by Word Of God months after the episode aired, confirming rhe fan theory of Cad Banebreaking her out.
In Young Justice the League is brainwashed by the Light and sent off to wreak some havoc. They later discover that they have no memory of what they did and spend five years trying to find out, completely overlooking the possibility that they could ask the GL Corps, or even the ring itself. Even if they turned up to be a dead end, it's still a better place to ask around about the whereabouts or activities of a certain green clad ringwearer than anywhere else on Earth. Weissman completely dodged the question, making vague claims about the government of the attacked planet being corrupt, but it seems like one of their guys being Brainwashed and Crazy and in possession of the strongest weapon in the universe would be a big issue for the Guardians, regardless of whether the planet would tell them they were attacked.
John Stewart: Hey ring/Salaak, what happened to me in the last X hours? Kthxbai."
Neds Newt: In the pilot, Ned pays exactly $1.65 (all of the change in his piggy bank) for Newton; the pet store owner actually rips him off, because the price list said $1.49. However, in a later episode, Ned loses his "lucky penny", described as such because it was his change when he bought Newton, even though we were explicitly shown the original transaction.
Bleach: AnimeEpisode 134 has Yumichika, Rin and Hanatarou using a 12th division machine that manifests spirits as physical beings so even humans can see them to study the recent Arrancar attacks. This leads into the main plot of the episode, the ghost of a baker who wants his mother to taste one of his recipes before he can move on. Since he can't make a cake and he can't approach her about his desires because she can't see him, Yumichika, Rin and Hanatarou have to learn how to make the perfect cake and get his mother to taste it. The obvious issue here is that the machine they were using at the start of the episode meant they could have revealed the ghost to the mother right at the start, got her to make and taste the cake rendering the rest of the episode unnecessary. Lampshaded at the end of the episode during the next episode preview.
Yumichika: So that soul-revealing device isn't just for you?
Rin: Yes, it can materialise any nearby soul.
Yumichika: So, if we had used it on him in the beginning, we wouldn't have had to work so hard.
Rin: I see! Yumichika-san, you're so smart!
Yumichika: Unbelievable!
Fan Fiction
This parody of the original Battlestar Galactica contains this exchange between Captain Alpo (cough) and Lieutennant Startrek (cough cough):
ALPO: Say, Carrion is hundreds of light-yarons [sic] away. How did you get back so quickly? STARTREK: The same way I got there. I went through a loophole in the plot!
In the Sonic fanfiction Chao of the World, Unite!, plot holes are used so frequently they are a form of transportation.
Maria: Boy, it's a good thing that severe decompression from that hole isn't causing the ship to buckle and explode, or that the air that's whooshing out isn't knocking us into the sun, or something.
In the fanmade parody campaign "Deus Ex Machina" for FreeSpace, 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...)
In the same fashion in the "Ridiculous" campaign of FreeSpace, a bunch of ships from different universes and time get caught in some plot hole dimension. Then it's a whole bunch of ridiculous (hence the name?) canon and non-canon stuff. Not to mention the This! Is! Sparta! part. Did I tell you about a ship measuring the "plot density" before entering the plot hole, and getting a negative result ?
In the Billy and Mandy video game, Mandy asks Grim why he can touch the bad mojo balls and not go crazy, to which Grim replies, "I thought we agreed not to talk about the plot holes, Mandy."
In Alan Wake, Plot Holes form the villain's primary advantage. The Lake brings to life anything that an artist creates while inside it, but if that artist leaves an unexplained hole, the Darkness fills it in in the worst possible way. The previous writer before Wake simply wrote his wife back to life without any explanation, but the Darkness was happy to provide one.
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.
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!
Gleefully parodied by Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes, in the Tempts Fate 9 bonus strip. Tempts fights an ancient dragon, the speaking of whose name will cause him to be sucked into a Plot Hole and vanish forever.
An old David Herbert comic Golden Gamers used to frequently use plot holes as one of the abilities of the main characters.
Ansem Retort not only handwaved the "Yuffie got killed in Season 1" hole, but pointed out that recurring characters include Darth Maul and Jesus, so any minor plot hole pretty much means nothing.
Web Original
The Protectors of the Plot Continuum actually harness plot holes to make their technology work, such as portal devices or inter-universe communicators.
A literal plot hole is featured in To Boldly Flee, as explained by Dr. Insano. In the end, The Nostalgia Critic absorbs the Plot Hole and becomes one with the universe.
Ultra Fast Pony's second episode is titled "Fillin' Dem Plot Holes, Bro!" Twilight Sparkle spends the entire Previously On montage explaining crucial backstory information that should have been in the previous episode, but wasn't. Even then, she fails to explain the Elements of Harmony, so when it comes time to use them she simply declares, "Vaguely established magical friend powers, activate! ... It's a plot hole. Deal with it!"
Western Animation
In the Tiny ToonsMade-for-TV MovieHow I Spent My Summer Vacation, Buster and Babs return to Acme Acres via a literal "plot hole", to which Babs remarks "I was wondering how those hack writers were going to wrap this up." 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!"
Similarly in The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk and Yzma get struck by lightning and 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.
In The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Otter Gone Wild", a feral Marlene is captured by a giant cage falling out of nowhere. King Julien asks where the cage came from. Kowalski replies that that's classified information.
One episode of Ed Edd N Eddy has the three searching for a television to watch a monster movie marathon on after Sarah kicks them out of Ed's place. At one point, Edd asks why they don't just watch it at his or Eddy's house.
Phil says that the Annihilatrix is up and running, to which Killface is baffled because they made it clear that it was sold for scrap. But that fine because Ret-Con Construction bought all of the pieces back and rebuilt it.
Another thing that was wierd is why Killface does not murder Phil, given that we routinely see Killface murder people who annoy him over petty thinks and here Phil is doing far worse. This was confusing, but accepted as some bizzare part of Killface's gentlemanly demeanor. This is broken in the last episode with Phil where Killface does try, and fails, to kill Phil.
Stewie crossdresses to get a role on a childrens' show, falls for a female co-star, and reveals himself on a live broadcast. Afterwards, Brian asks why on Earth they would do a live broadcast of a kids' show, and Stewie tells him "You really don't want to pull the thread on this one".
In one episode Brian discovers he has a 13-year-old son. Stewie asks him how that's possible, considering he's only 7, causing Brian to attempt to handwave it aside by claiming that he's older in dog-years. Stewie rightly points out that it doesn't work like that, so Brian just tells him that if he doesn't like it, he can go andbitch about it on the internet!
The Unicron Singularity, introduced in the Unicron Trilogy, is a massive continuity-damaging presence created by the world-destroying Unicron. It is also canonically stated to be the cause of every inconsistency and plot hole that was and will be created in the Transformers multiverse.
It's simultaneously the cause of and solution to every plot hole ever in Transformers; past, present, or future. It's best not to think about how that works. It's probably a case of "Break it I did. Fix it I shall".
How Fry finally manages to defeat the Brainspawn (and fulfill the destiny the Niblonians arranged for him) in Futurama: He trapped the Master Brain in a book he wrote, "a crummy world of plot holes and spelling mistakes!"
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