6 Actual Answers To Famously Unsolved Movie/TV Mysteries

6 Why Was A Camera Crew Filming A Regular Office In The First Place?

Did you ever wonder why, throughout all nine seasons of The Office, there was always a documentary crew present? Just ... filming a paper company forever, for ... compelling TV? Why would they be doing that?

And why would Toby agree to be in this?

The Explanation:

Shortly before the events of The Office, a Dunder Mifflin employee committed suicide. This was revealed during the show's second season. In the episode " Performance Review," Michael Scott cleans out a suggestion box that's been gathering dust for years. In the box is a suggestion from a man named Tom that the office should provide better counseling for depressed workers. Michael doesn't know who that is, and so another character mimes blowing her brains out.

Et tu, Phyllis?

That's why the camera crew is there: A man killed himself, and the filmmakers wanted to document how his friends were dealing with it. The really sad part is that no one really seems to care. According to the writers, Ryan the temp was hired almost immediately after Tom's suicide, because death or no death, Dunder Mifflin is a business that cannot shut down, or even slow down, just because someone lost a battle with depression. Huh, you know, maybe The Office was more realistic than we gave it credit for.

Really, you couldn't give him one Dundie, asshole?

5 What Was Up With The Ape Lincoln Statue?

In the 2001 remake of Planet Of The Apes, Marky Mark lands on an alien planet populated by intelligent apes, where he dang-near bangs Helena Bonham Carter in sexy simian make-up. It invented more than a few fetishes, we're sure.

Or maybe merely reinforced the ones that were already there ...

Now, unlike in the original, the Ape Planet does not turn out to be Earth. But after Wahlberg returns to the Solar System (while passing through an electromagnetic storm) he discovers that Earth has been taken over by intelligent apes, with the statue of the sadistic chimp general he met on Ape Planet sitting right where the Lincoln Memorial used to be.

Aperaham Lincoln, if you will.

How did Thade (the chimp general) get to Earth? Why are there apes everywhere? Is this even Earth? What the fuck is going on?!

The Explanation:

The ending was so notoriously confusing that the movie's DVD came with a graph explaining it.

Just a little supplemental quantum physics homework with your Walhberg flick.

All right, so after Wahlberg got into his pod and set course for Earth, it's implied that Thade and a few of his buddies got into the other pod (there were two of them on the Ape Planet) and followed him. They both then passed through the electromagnetic storm, which also acts as a time portal. However, because of the unstable nature of the temporal storm, they reached Earth at different times. It would seem that Thade and co. landed on Earth many decades/centuries in our relative past, and with nothing better to do, proceeded to take over the place. By the time Wahlberg finally landed back home, humanity had long been enslaved by a race of intelligent apes. Which were created by ... Thade and his time-traveling friends banging our regular apes and slowly creating more and more intelligent primates? That's the sexy answer. We always go with the sexy answer.

4 How Does Cypher Get In And Out Of The Matrix Alone?

In the first Matrix movie, Cypher, the guy played by the guy who always plays traitors, decides to betray his friends. Shocking! But first he must discuss the plan with Agent Smith inside the Matrix. But ... how? As we've seen in the movie, you need someone by your side to jack you in and out, and probably jack others things in different directions as needed.

*cough*

The Explanation:

Check out this scene:

On the surface, it looks like Cypher perving on some computer code. But what he's really doing is distracting Neo so that he doesn't ask what Cypher was doing before he came in. Say, what WAS he doing? Well, according to the Wachowskis themselves: "Cypher ... is setting up an automated system to allow him to go meet with Agent Smith." That ... makes a lot of sense. Cypher is one of the ship's IT guys, so if anybody could do it, it would be him. Plus, no one ever said you couldn't go into the Matrix alone; the audience just assumed that. Probably because we all know it's better when you don't do your own jackin'.

You might go blind.

3 What The Hell, Lost?

So ... Lost, huh? What was the deal with that show? Were they time-travelers, incompetent aliens, sexy magicians -- or wait, does Lost take place in the afterlife? Is everyone on the show dead? Was it all the dream of an autistic child?

The Explanation:

We've already answered the 108 most pressing questions about what happened on Lost, which basically boil down to: It's not the afterlife, and the island is magic. As for every other question, some were answered in an epilogue on the Season 6 DVD set, though they too can easily be summed up: It was an experiment by DHARMA, Lost's mad science research project.

And their sister branch, GREG.

Here are some of the questions the epilogue answers:

"What's with that giant bird from Seasons 1 and 2?" DHARMA experimented on animals! "Why do women have pregnancy problems on the Island?" It's the electromagnetism! "What was that weird thing in Room 23 that looked like a brainwashing video?" A brainwashing video! DHARMA used it to erase memories! "Where did the food drops come from?" A warehouse in Guam! "Why polar bears?" They were good candidates for testing!

Also, one of the racist DHARMA scientists refused to work with black bears.

If you're feeling sort of insulted by the anticlimactic nature of these answers, then good. The writers made it clear that fans who demand logic instead of reveling in the show's "mysterious" insanity can go fuck themselves.

2 Why Didn't The Good Witch Simply Tell Dorothy That The Slippers Could Take Her Home?

In the 1939 The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy is transported to the magical land of Oz via a tornado. Her house crash-lands on an evil witch, killing her instantly and horribly, because that's how you used to start children's movies back in the day. Dorothy soon comes across Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and she gives the girl the dead witch's shoes as some sort of sick trophy. Then she tells Dorothy that to get home, she must find the Wizard.

And that's a dirty damn lie. It turns out Dorothy could have returned home anytime she wanted, thanks to her magical shoes. When asked why she didn't say so from the start, Glinda explains that Dorothy wouldn't have believed her. So Dorothy was willing to go look for a wizard, but could not have been convinced to tap her heels three times? Is that what we're going with?

"You know I just saw flying monkeys and a talking cat, right?"

The Explanation:

In the original Oz books, there are TWO Good Witches. Glinda is the one from the South (born and raised, Quadling Country was where she spent most of her days), and she is the one who tells Dorothy how to go back home. The one Dorothy meets in Munchkin Country, though, is the Good Witch of the North, named Locasta Tattypoo (no, really). They are two totally different characters, with the latter obviously having no idea about the true power of the magical slippers.

However, the movie, most likely due to budgetary and time constraints, decided to merge these characters, thus creating this little inconsistency. Or -- and we're just spitballing here -- maybe witches are jerks. Lying-ass jerks. Even the "good" ones.

The "good" character has a town full of slaves. Go figure.

1 Why Did Mobsters Send Their Victims To The Past To Be Executed?

In the future, mankind has finally mastered time travel, which the mob now uses to send their enemies to the past to be executed by assassins called Loopers. That's obviously the best -- nay, only -- use for such technology.

But let's ignore pretty much everything else and focus on the smallest problem here -- mainly, why can't mobsters murder people in the future and then send their corpses to the past? For one, paying folks in the past to bury a body must be way cheaper than assassination. Plus, then you wouldn't have to worry about some of your victims escaping, which happens TWICE in the movie.

"No no, it's fine. We blindfold them."

The Explanation:

Admittedly, this never made it into the final cut, but Looper's director/writer explains that in the future, people have nanobots inside them that monitor their vitals. So if you kill someone, a signal is instantly sent to the local cops, and minutes later you have a future-SWAT team three-quarters of the way up your future-asshole. But, for whatever reason, if you send someone into the past, the Murder Alarm won't go off. But why then (SPOILER ALERT) was Bruce Willis' wife murdered in the future by the mob? It was a mistake. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which in a Bruce Willis movie is "anywhere near Bruce Willis" and "at all times."

Nathan is a Christian and says things like, "Good news! Your sins are forgiven!" He is also called Treegnome, and is hilarious, usually here, on his website. Abraham is a Mexican lawyer, and he likes "Pan de muerto." You can say hi to him on Twitter here or laugh at his attempts at drawing on his DeviantArt here.

For more plot holes that have been addressed, check out 7 Famous Movie Flaws That Were Explained in Deleted Scenes and 6 Baffling Movie Moments With Really Logical Explanations.

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Check out the movie version of David Wong's first book John Dies at the End, starring Paul Giamatti.

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror, the third book in David Wong's John Dies at the End series, is available now!