Headscratchers / Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Expensive execution

• "Gulag" is one very expensive way of executing somebody. That horse could've been doing something more useful than dying out in the desert.
  • The horse was probably sick with radiation anyway, so it couldn't provide meat (they had no use for horses to begin with, since they had methane-fueled cars.)
• Methane's still going to be a finite resource, as there are only so many pigs. Why not use a bit of horsepower as a supplement?
  • Pigs are omnivores, and can eat quite a variety of things. Including, for example, dead prisoners. Horses and donkeys are a bit more picky, diet-wise.
  • More importantly, pigs breed much faster than other mammalian livestock. Pretty important, considering how a lot of animals may be infertile or produce non-viable offspring due to fallout exposure.
• And indeed, how many fiberglass heads do they have for that?
  • It's possible that they don't use a fiberglass head for each Gulag, or they can make or purchase more heads as needed.
  • Or they just stick any old container on a prisoner's head, or blindfold them if they can't spare a container. The only real purpose of covering the head of the condemned would be to obscure their vision and make it harder for them to find their way back to Bartertown.
• On a related note, are we really to believe everyone was okay with using up resources on a gigantic metal wheel with big metal letters all over it, that can be spun, just so Aunty Entity can go "You suck, let me spin up a random punishment"?
  • Speaking historically, people have often be surprisingly accepting of much more costly spectacles as a part of a justice system.

Aunty Entity's Plan

• Aunty Entity hired Max to kill Blaster in the Thunderdome so that she could get rid of him without publicly executing him and undermining her own laws. Of course, she ends up doing exactly that anyways, without undermining any of her authority. Did she not realize that she could screw the rules, because she made them? Besides, she easily had enough men to take out Blaster (Max himself says so), and with the embargos that Master keeps on pulling, she easily had the justification to do so.
  • She said that Master Blaster were "practically family". They couldn't be involved or the town would revolt. It was Max who revealed there was a deal, and Pig Killer damn does nearly start a riot. Auntie cleverly points out that right or wrong, she and Max did have a contract, and he violated it.
  • Auntie wanted to have a more complying Master once Blaster died. The plan was for Master to think that Blaster got legally killed in a "fair" fight with Max. This way Master wouldn't blame Auntie Entity and would collaborate more willingly to produce fuel for Bartertown afterwards without everyone having to put up with Master's jagoff attitude. As it turned out, since Max spilled the beans, Auntie had to coerce Master by force, which was what she wanted to avoid.

Plane

• Max uses a camel-drawn cart, Auntie needs methane to make Bartertown run. At the time MM:BT is set upon it's obvious oil has disappeared... so where does Jedediah get fuel for his plane?
  • He's shown in Bartertown, perhaps he had it converted to methane as well.
    • That's a really tough sell. Looking purely at how much energy each fuel has (otherwise known as specific energy), sure, it makes sense: the plane probably runs on gas, which has a specific energy of 46.4 MJ/kg, and is far, far outshone by methane's specific energy of 55.5 MJ/kg. But, methane has an energy density of 22.2 MJ/l. Stack that against gasoline's 34.2 MJ/l and the problem appears: methane has too much energy per unit mass and yet far too little energy per volume unit. The net result would be that unless Jed is a mechanical genius, he'd probably have the engines failing to start because of the low-energy-density fuel...then blowing the cylinders from feeding in too much. And even that would be extremely difficult because the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk he's flying runs a Continental IO-520 engine, which is fuel-injected. So unless the methane is available in liquid form - unlikely, given Bartertown's setup and the fact that liquid methane is rocket fuel - it just won't work. It's much more likely that he's a good enough pirate that he can afford the fuel he needs, or he's distilling methanol and running a very rich mixture. (Which would be risky as all hell if not for the whole 'pocyclypse having happened.)
  • With an alternate form of fuel available for their ground vehicles and generators, the Bartertown community is bound to be one of the few places on Earth where "guzzaline" isn't exceptionally valuable. If there's another oil derrick-plus-refinery outfit cranking out their own petrol in the vicinity, they could well be trading it cheap enough for Jedediah to trade stolen camels for.

The Whistle

• Max turns the course of the Thunderdome fight by blowing a whistle to gain an edge over Blaster. Can a whistle like that really affect some people like it did with Blaster or was it just a convenient Weaksauce Weakness asspulled to resolve the fight?
  • It's at least implied that the helmet Blaster wears makes him vulnerable to the whistle's pitch, which resonates perfectly with the helmet's shape and material. So yes, it's an asspull that the whistle coincidentally has that effect, but at least it's a foreshadowed one: Max does observe Blaster's sensitivity before facing him in the ring.