Headscratchers / The Fly II

• Why didn't Martin Brundle and Beth in The Fly II even consider going to the authorities or the media? Bartok was planning to permit Martin to undergo an unpleasant transformation into Brundle-fly while making no attempt to do anything about his condition and lying to him about the medical treatment he was receiving, and then use him as a guinea pig and presumably perform experiments on him without his consent (and it's implied he won't be treated very well if the mutated dog and what eventually becomes of Bartok after Martin exchanges DNA with him is any indication). That can't be legal. Sure, Bartok Industries could probably afford pretty good lawyers, but it's odd how Martin and Beth never even seem to consider the possibility of trying to get the legal intervention and/or trying to publicize their story to make it impossible for Bartok Industries to just have Martin quietly disappear into their facility never to come out again.
  • It's probably safe to assume that a Megacorp like Bartok Industries has the means to prevent them contacting the media, or stifle/cease coverage of the story if they did.
  • Also, this was 1989. This was before social media, broadband Internet, public Wi Fi and smartphones. The media back then would've been limited to Newspapers, Radio and Television and Bartok Industries had already gotten in front of them and made the public think that Martin had kidnapped Beth.
  • Not to mention that Beth and Martin were on the run, scared and not thinking entirely straight. Their priority was finding a way to cure Martin, not go public.

• In The Fly II why do they dismiss the teleporter as "the world's most expensive juicer" just because it can't teleport living matter? They act as if the teleporter is useless if it can't transmit living matter. A teleporter that can transmit non-living things only would still absolutely revolutionize freight transportation. Sure, it sucks that you can't send anything alive through it, but that wouldn't stop them from making huge amounts of money from it. Even if the "anything alive you put in it comes out warped or pulped" extends to non-living things derived from living things like wood and paper it'd still be potentially quite useful. It's sort of understandable why Seth Brundle would want to perfect his life's work before trying to market it, but Bartok Industries should have been drooling over the immense commercial possibilities of even the "defective" version of the teleporter.
  • Remember the steak from the first movie? It didn't come out quite right. Logic dictates that all meat and plant products would similarly suffer. This might even extend to wood. A metal transporter might be useful, but we only ever see person sized teleportation tubes. Maybe they can't build bigger ones and keep them stable.
  • Huh? "Can't build a bigger one?" Really?
    • Why not? We're (for obvious reasons) not given the exact details of how the teleporters work — for all we know, the teleportation field becomes increasingly unstable as it is scaled up.
  • The military would have NUMEROUS applications that a transporter could be use in. In fact...not being able to transport organic matter could be considered an important safety measure given people's nagging habit of doing stupid and foolish things. So Bartok could have obtained a single customer (The Pentagon) made BILLIONS of dollars and not even bothered w/ Martin Brundle.
    • The Pentagon would still want a reliable way to transport even non-organic matter and guarantee it would come out intact. Guns and ammo need to keep their caliber, medicine needs to keep its right ingredients, etc. Plus they would not keep waiting indefinitely for Bartok's "just one more test" without demanding more input, something Bartok would not want to give.
  • Another reason why it wouldn't be used for freight is really simple: biological items could somehow end up inside the transport pod and end up being fused with the items inside, thus ruining their functionality. Rats and insects have been known to have gotten into cargo containers for shipping. So, can you imagine the biological aspects of an organism interfering with other materials on a molecular level? What if the genetic material of the fly was absorbed into a shipment of microchips that were sent through the transport? Do you honestly think those chips would function correctly with the material of a living organism mixed into it? Not to mention, seeing with what happened with Seth towards the end of the final act when three pods were used, there's a good chance that any animal that had managed to get in remained alive and parts absorbed with whatever was sent through.
  • In one draft of the script, the Telepods not functioning correctly was due to Stathis sabotaging the computer system. Apparently, all the data, software and operating system were stored on laserdiscs (which notably is an analog format, not digital) and at some point Stathis had removed them after the end of the first film.