Voodoo Shark / Live-Action TV

• At the beginning of Animorphs, Elfangor gives the kids an alien disk (something that doesn't happen in the books), which they spend the first season trying to unlock. While a good idea in theory, as it gives a fresh mystery to viewers who have already read all the books, when they finally unlock the disk the explanation for it is really weird and makes no sense. It's programmed to only open when Tobias uses it (as Elfangor is really his dad), contains a message for him, and is able to cure his Shapeshifter Mode Lock. There are several problems with this: how did Elfangor know Tobias was his son, or that he had a human son? And if he did, how did he know Tobias would be there when he crash-landed in the first place? If the disk can fix people who are stuck in a morph, why does it only work once (as Tobias himself says)? Why didn't he tell the other Andalites he had discovered the cure for Nothlit-ism (being stuck in a morph)? It gets even worse in the next episode, where he gives the disk to Rachel so she can morph into a Yeerk and hide in his head, with the "explanation" that the disk has Yeerk DNA on it. This raises the following questions: 1. How can a disk have DNA on it? Is it somehow made out of Yeerks? 2. Why did none of the Yeerk scientists notice it had Yeerk DNA on it? 3. Why would Elfangor put Yeerk DNA on it? How would he know that one of the Animorphs would need to morph into a Yeerk at some point?
• The Community episode "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics" leaves the identity of the mysterious "Ass-Crack Bandit" deliberately ambiguous — but the series finale includes a brief moment strongly implying that it was Annie (which is apparently confirmed by the finale's script, and by Dan Harmon's own comments). But if you actually watch "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics" with this in mind, it just raises numerous questions. For one thing: Annie wouldn't have had access to the faculty lounge, so how did she get around the school so quickly without being seen? For another thing: she was in Dean Pelton's office with Jeff when he received the Bandit's recorded message, so how did she send the message from the stables? Why did she get so nervous being alone with Duncan in his office if she knew that he wasn't the Bandit? And how did she successfully pretend to be a fan of the Dave Matthews Band? Then again: considering this is Community we're talking about; it's possible that the moment in the finale was just a joke, and the writers never intended the mystery to have a solution.
• The way Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explained the musical numbers counts as one. At first it was just assumed they were all happening in Rebecca's imagination, particularly given there are a few cases in the earlier episodes where Rebecca would try to sing for real and be lousy at it. Even so, as early as the sixth episode, other characters have musical numbers when Rebecca isn't present. To explain this, Word of God said that Rebecca's own mental illness was spreading throughout the town of West Covina and making people have their own musical numbers. This just raises more questions, such as, how can a mental illness be contagious to begin with? And even if you accept that, why do all of the other characters who have musical numbers otherwise act exactly the same as before they were "infected"? Finally, and weirdest of all, there is a character who is basically a personification of the Santa Ana Winds (or "Devil Winds"), who gets a couple musical numbers. So, how can a meteorological phenomenon catch a mental illness?
• Doctor Who:
  • Doctor Who's initial explanation for how the TARDIS crew could understand the Daleks was explained in The Dalek Book as being because the Dalek "voices" are a form of electronic telepathy, so they can speak in their own language and anyone can understand them. Fine, but how can the crew understand the Thals? The eventual explanation for Aliens Speaking English, implied by the time of the Fourth Doctor's tenure and outright stated in the revival series, is the much less cumbersome handwave that the TARDIS has a translation matrix which allows its passengers to understand the aliens (as well as making them unaware that it is doing this, although a few sufficiently clever companions have noticed).
  • The TARDIS translation matrix explanation also opens up a new question: what happens to companions who stay behind on alien worlds (like Steven in "The Savages") or in human history millennia before their own time (like Vicki in "The Myth Makers")?
  • Dodo's cold causing an epidemic in "The Ark" causes Steven to raise the obvious question: has this happened before? Aren't the travelers spreading disease everywhere they go? The Doctor waves this off with the remark, "Oh, I don't want to think it about it, dear boy. It's too horrifying. Though I must say that we're usually very healthy." Which in turn prompts two alternative questions: either (a) how are they so perfectly healthy that they never communicate any human/Time Lord diseases to the many species they meet that should not be immune to them (and why is Dodo an exception)?; or, (b) how are the Doctor and his rotating myriad of companions so consistently and unwaveringly sociopathic that they never worry about the rampaging death they bring to every world—except during this story?
    • This is not directly addressed, but indirectly explained in a Sixth Doctor audio drama, "Patient Zero": the TARDIS ordinarily cures/protects her inhabitants from any diseases she's capable of eliminating as long as they are travelling within her (the fact that she doesn't do that for the current companion and why she doesn't is one of the main cruxes of that story). While this explains why it doesn't happen all the time, there is still no explanation for why Dodo's cold caused this problem exactly once.
  • "Pyramids of Mars" has a pretty glaring continuity error. It's said that only the Doctor can use the TARDIS' controls... even though multiple characters have been able to pilot it both before and after this episode. Robert Holmes offered the explanation that the Doctor was simply lying, but the problem with this is that Sutekh could read the Doctor's mind. If he was lying, shouldn't Sutekh have known?
  • Played for Laughs in "Last Christmas," when Santa keeps giving ridiculous explanations for all the impossible things he does. Of course it's impossible for him to fly around the entire world in one night giving out presents — that's why he has a second sleigh. And obviously reindeer can't fly — that's why he feeds them magic carrots. The elves scoffingly treat the "logical" explanation for how Clara got all those presents that appeared under the tree every Christmas (that her parents bought them) as if it were one of these. Of course, since it's all happening in a dream world, this makes sense; the subconsciouses of people who notice weird things in real dreams have been known to come up with Voodoo Shark explanations.
• First Wave has the prophecies of Nostradamus predicting alien experiments occurring on Earth in preparation for an all-out invasion. So far so good. It is later revealed that Nostradamus wasn't so much predicting the future... he was in fact an alien refugee from a previously conquered world and the invading aliens use the exact same experiments on each world they conquer. This doesn't explain why so many of his prophecies named specific places, people, and events in previous episodes. It would be so much simpler if Nostradamus was simply a human who saw the future.
• The final season of Game of Thrones had the Iron Fleet ambush. To wit: Daenerys is flying along on one of her dragons when the other is shot down and killed by a series of ballista shots from off-screen, all while Dany looks around in panicked confusion. It's only after the dragon is dead that she (and the camera) see the culprit - a dozen extremely visible ships directly in front of her. The Voodoo Shark came from David Benioff, one of the showrunners, who explained after the episode that "Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet". Viewers were quick to point out that Daenerys had discussed the Iron Fleet in the previous scene, that she was unlikely to forget about them after they'd already ambushed and decimated her forces multiple times, and most importantly, that this didn't actually explain how an entire fleet of ships with no cover in broad daylight had snuck up on her. As a result, "X kind of forgot about Y" became a meme to highlight the perceived drop in the show's writing quality.
• The Good Place: Played for laughs. In Season 3 Michael explains how he somehow managed to somehow go back in time and rescue the humans from their deaths and how he did after 300 years have passed in the afterlife with the explanation that time in the afterlife, rather than run linearly, runs in a line that roughly looks like "Jeremy Bearimy" in cursive English. The explanation makes no sense to the human cast (or the audience), especially when Chidi asks about what the dot over the i represents.
• In a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, Nina didn't come back in the third season of House of Anubis. Part of her reasoning was a revelation that The Chosen One and the Osirian could not be together or bad things will happen. However, fans quickly noticed that if the Osirian, who is the destined protector of the chosen one, cannot be around said chosen one, then there is no point in a protector at all.
• Late in How I Met Your Mother, Ted and Robin get Barney sufficiently drunk for him to reveal all his secrets, one of which being that he occasionally hides dehydrated doves on his person only to expose them to water when others are near, allowing the doves to fly away and making it look like he created them out of nothing. Of course, dehydrating the doves would have killed them outright, but since the episode establishes that when Barney is this intoxicated, he Cannot Tell a Lie, and since he later reveals an even more personal secret (namely, what his job actually is), which is proven true, the idea that he made that explanation up just to screw with them can be dismissed out of hand. It can only make one wonder... ^note Of course, another possibility is that, since the whole show is Ted telling the story to his children after the fact, that Barney found out about this after regaining lucidity and forbade Ted from revealing how he "actually" does it because a magician can never reveal his secrets.
• The entire shared continuity between Kamen Rider and Super Sentai is this when it comes to crossovers not only with each other, but within seasons of the same franchise. Sometimes every season takes place in their own universe, sometimes all Rider and Sentai seasons take place in two different worlds, other times both series take place within the same world. This hasn't stopped crossovers to have characters who previously met to acknowledge each other, handwaving whichever logic the current season goes by that may contradict what was pre-stablished. And that's not getting into continuity errors this may cause. For a simple example, Kamen Rider Fourze has it clear that humanity is still struggling to journey into space, but Dengeki Sentai Changeman already had an organization that built vessels capable of space travel. Of course, a lot of this can be handwaved as both being Long-Runners with different writing teams each season, like the aforementioned example as both seasons aired 26 years apart, but sometimes this may even contradict how historical events went down: Super Sentai has had at least 6 retellings of the extinction of the dinosaurs that have no connection to one another, while Kamen Rider has had multiple different depictions of Oda Nobunaga that are nothing like each other.
• While the entire Law & Order franchise uses and abuses Hollywood Law for dramatic purposes, the Mothership episode "Profiteer'' pushed Hollywood Law into this trope: The murder of a CEO led to the discovery that the victim's company knowingly shipped worthless body armor to troops in Afghanistan.^note A batch had been sabotaged by an anti-war employee. Recalling the tainted vests would've put the company behind on their shipment quota When Jack McCoy files Criminally Negligent Homicide charges against the company's next-in-command, the Army steps in and tells McCoy to cut a deal, quickly and quietly, to make the case go away. Otherwise, the Army would step in on the defendant's behalf and trash his case. Over Jack's protests, his boss Arthur Branch agrees and orders Jack to make the deal. The problems with this:
  1. By the time the Army showed up, McCoy had already rested his case. As this case wasn't under any media restriction, any damaging info that the Army would want to keep quiet would already be in the record and witnessed by multiple people in the gallery.
  2. At that point, there couldn't possibly be anything the Army could offer in the defendant's case that McCoy couldn't rip apart with the simple question of why they waited so long to step in.
  3. And why would the Army wait so long to step in and protect one of its major contractors? Even from a narrative standpoint, it wouldn't be the first time major chunks of an episode would feature McCoy fighting another government branch
  4. This all assumes the judge would even let anyone from the Army testify. In Real Life and in the show's history, judges don't like having last-minute major witnesses sprung on them. And any argument for inclusion ran back into the "Why now" problem.
  5. If the Army was so concerned about the case, why didn't they just invoke "national security" and stop the trial in its tracks? Wouldn't be the first time the show played that card, either.
  6. And why would the Army want to continue to do business with a company that just defrauded them and whose faulty product had already cost one life (and the ending suggested there were more)? It's not like there aren't plenty of companies that would leap into the space they vacated (which was the point of shipping the worthless vests: to meet their quota and keep their contract).
• Power Rangers
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive has this in the very same episode the plothole comes from! When Miratrix takes one of the Poseidon scrolls, Dax just stands there, even though he could do anything to stop her. It is later revealed it was a fake, just in time for the Finishing Move. Except for the fact that he never had any reason to suspect Mira and acted as if he lost the real thing.
  • Power Rangers in Space: In the earlier episodes Darkonda gets destroyed multiple times, only to come back after an episode or two. This would eventually be explained by saying he has nine lives, like a cat. This just raises the question of why he has nine lives (particularly since he doesn't look even remotely like a cat), which the show never explains. It doesn't help that we only see him actually die seven times, with the last one being when he's Killed Off for Real in the penultimate episode, so what happened to his other two lives?
• In the early seasons of Quantum Leap, it was assumed by the audience that Sam Beckett mentally possessed those people he "leapt" into. It was then explained in-canon that Sam actually physically went through time and took the place of those people, who subsequently took his place in the future. The "aura" of that person surrounded Sam, which is why he looked and sounded like someone else to everyone but the audience (And Al). This allowed him to do things the "leapees" couldn't (like retaining his sight when leaping into a blind musician.) But then this brought up an entirely different question: How could Sam wear the clothing of people much smaller or larger than him or fit into spaces far too small for a man his size (as when he leapt into a lab monkey)?
• The first-season finale of Riverdale has an infamous example of this, as pointed out in this series review by Super Eyepatch Wolf. The season ends with a sequence where an otherwise calm and hopeful moment with Archie and his father is broken when a robber enters Pop's diner, threatens both Pop and the waitresses at gunpoint, and (as Archie looks on) threatens him before Archie's father Fred ends up Taking the Bullet for him when the robber fires at him and flees. The second season then attempted to retcon this; the gunman was not a robber at all, but a serial killer known as the "Black Hood" who was targeting Fred. This creates a number of inconsistencies with the original scene, such as why he went after Pop first when Fred was sitting in plain sight. One the writers do try to address later is why, when he finally does turn his gun on Fred, he demands that he hand over his wallet rather than firing immediately. It's suggested that the Black Hood planned to use the wallet to find out where he lived so that he could kill him in his home at a later date... a theory which falls apart as soon as the Black Hood is revealed to be Hal Cooper, who, in addition to creating several new glaring inconsistencies, should already know full well where Fred lives considering he's his next-door neighbour.
• Secret Invasion (2023):
  • Early on, it is revealed that lead character James "Rhodey" Rhodes (a.k.a. War Machine) has been replaced with a female Skrull, ostensibly as part of a long gambit by the Skrulls to replace key officials in the U.S. government dating back several years. It's implied that this has been in effect since Captain America: Civil War, since the real Rhodey is wearing the hospital gown he had on partway into that movie. This was clearly not planned ahead, since it clashes with the driving plot of this series that the Skrulls can't find a habitable planet. If Rhodey was a Skrull during the events of Avengers: Endgame, he would have been in contact with Captain Marvel and Rocket and would know about different planets that might be suitable settlements. Not to mention that Rhodey actually visits one of these planets at the beginning of the film, where Thanos is living, which seems to be entirely uncharted and has land available for farming.
  • Another reveal given in Secret Invasion is how Nick Fury was such a successful Spymaster during the Infinity Saga: namely that he had Talos, Soren, Gravik and a number of other Skrulls working for him in the shadows during that time, who helped him rise the ranks in S.H.I.E.L.D. This however brings into question why the Skrulls were absent and/or unable to help with major issues in previous entries, particularly the rise of HYDRA within S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Fans of Smallville debate whether or not the explanation given for Lois Lane's employment at the Daily Planet is a Voodoo Shark. Because Lois was romantically involved with her supervisor (the guy who hired her) she briefly questions the reasons for her being hired. Her editor quells any fears she may have had by showing her the article she wrote for the Inquisitor the previous year. However, given that the editor is an accelerated-aged clone with implanted memories who didn't exist at the time of her writing the article, it raises the question of how true his claim could be. Further, when he offered her the job, he didn't know who she was (she had just walked in off the street to see her cousin) so his claim that it was on the basis of her work is even more doubtful since he couldn't have possibly made the connection.
• Supernatural:
  • After the episodes "Taxi Driver" and "I'm No Angel" caused a backlash due to several nonsensical changes to the abilities and motivations of Reapers, CW Executive Chad Kennedy attempted to address the changes on his Twitter by stating that Reapers were actually a type of angel. Not only did this fail to actually fix most of the continuity issues, it made absolutely no sense with previous canon regarding both Reapers and angels, and only served to make the issue worse. This retcon eventually did get introduced into show canon in the later episode "Stairway to Heaven", and it was just as nonsensical then.
  • The episode "Thinman" opens with several seemingly impossible murders, which makes the Winchesters think they were committed by a ghost or some other supernatural creature. At the end, they are revealed to be the work of two normal humans working together. While this does explain the monster's apparent ability to teleport, it fails to explain the first murder. What made it unusual, besides the murderer's appearance, was that the victim was found in a room locked from the inside. No matter how many killers there were, this should still be impossible to pull off unless one of them stayed hidden under the bed until the police came in and pretended to have just arrived, which no matter how you look at it should be extremely suspicious.
• The final revelation of Samantha Mulder's fate in The X-Files: In short, she was literally taken up to heaven by angels to become a celestial spirit so that the aliens would not kill her.

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