Completely Moronic Plot Twists TV And Movies Needs To Retire
We all have that one friend with the uncanny ability to know how a movie will end before it's even halfway through, and we all hate them deeply. The "good" news is that you, too, can become that annoying friend by simply paying attention to the shockingly dumb ways in which Hollywood writers telegraph what's going to happen, including but not limited to ...
"Bald Mentor" Is The Deadliest Job In The Marvel Universe
"Wise mentor" is already an occupation with a high fatality rate in superhero movies, but if it's a Marvel one and the character is bald? That's a dead man/woman/alien walking right there. The first Iron Man movie had Ho Yinsen, a balding man with glasses who becomes an unlikely mentor to the protagonist, helps create his superheroic identity, and is murdered like two seconds after the hero's debut.
Then, the first Captain America movie had a totally different character called Dr. Erskine, a balding man with glasses who becomes an unlikely mentor to the protagonist, helps create his superheroic identity, and is murdered like two seconds after the hero's debut.
Doctor Strange switched things up by making the doomed mentor a woman (Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One), but this deviation from the formula is balanced out by the fact that she's completely bald.
Also bald, also wise, and also dead is Zuri from Black Panther, the trusted royal adviser whose death justified the "kill" in Killmonger.
Captain Marvel's Dr. Wendy Lawson wasn't bald, a fact she bragged about right before her death ("How's my hair?"). This might explain why the movie's baddie ends up taking her form -- the universe wasn't pleased with her hirsute arrogance and punished her.
Then we have Yondu from Guardians Of The Galaxy (bald except for the split Frisbee lodged on his skull), who always seemed like a pretty shit father figure for Star-Lord. Then Star-Lord learned to appreciate him, and of course he died right away.
On the TV side, we have Pop from Luke Cage, who tried to hide his advancing baldness by wearing a hat at all times, but the Grim Reaper wasn't fooled.
The X-Men universe had Professor X, who, as one of the most famous bald people in all of fiction, had the honor of dying not once but twice (three times if you count the Days Of Future Past future). He gets Thanos'd by Phoenix in The Last Stand and stabbed by Wolverine 2.0 in Logan.
Apart from Dr. Lawson, the only other exception is Odin in Thor: Ragnarok, who still had a divine mane when he surrendered to his sparkly death. That, or they cut the moment when Thor and Loki find his toupee laying on the ground after he fades away.
Happy Moments Are A Death Sentence In Game Of Thrones And Joss Whedon Shows
Game Of Thrones was famous for killing characters suddenly and without warning, like life itself but with slightly more fire-breathing reptiles. That is, unless you happened to notice the show's biggest tell: whenever someone had a happy family moment, they were mega-screwed. In Season 5, the usually cold-hearted King Stannis shares an uncharacteristic hug with his greyscale-afflicted daughter, Shireen, and even calls her his little princess. Aww.
Five episodes later, he lets a witch burn her alive as a sacrifice to turn around his army's bad fortunes. The ritual didn't seem to be terribly effective considering that Stannis himself died on the very next episode, but hey, at least he tried, you know?
Another sweet father/daughter moment is when Jamie Lannister tries to tell his secret daughter Myrcella that he's her real dad, but she says she already knows, and she's glad that he is. Again, they hug. It's a very moving scene, gross incest aside.
She dies exactly one minute later. Someone gave her poison just before the hug, but we're pretty sure she would have died a couple of years later anyway due to having an upside-down liver or something. And in Season 3, Episode 7, Robb Stark finds out he's going to be a dad and things are going swimmingly for him in general. Everything's coming up Robb!
Season 3, Episode 9, is the Red Wedding, where the couple and their unborn child are brutally murdered. There likely would have been more instances of this during the final season, but we'll never know since the show was cancelled halfway through. Yep.
Joss Whedon is also a huge fan of this trope, and just torturing his fans in general. Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel The Vampire-Vampire Slayer were full of examples, like Willow reconciling with Tara (dead the same episode), Giles getting back together with Jenny (dead the same episode), or Wesley finally hooking up with Fred (dead and taken over by a demon the next episode). But the silliest one is in Dollhouse, when two characters confess their feelings for each other, kiss for the first time, and then someone walks in and shoots one of them in the head, all within two minutes.
Never Take Photos Of Your Family To War
If a soldier in a movie so much as glances at a photo of their family, they're toast. If they're a pilot? Burnt toast. The Sum Of All Fears with Ben Affleck, for instance, starts with a warplane's pilot clumsily dropping a picture of his wife and kid in the cockpit, bending to pick it up (as if saying "eh, it's only a second, what's the worst that could happen?") ... and immediately getting hit by a missile.
One of the WWII pilots in George Lucas' Red Tails also stares at a photo of his sweetheart right before crashing down. Meanwhile, in the equally realistic war drama Independence Day, Randy Quaid looks at a Polaroid of his kids just as he's about to blow himself up to destroy the alien mothership.
Shooter starts with Mark Wahllberg's spotter showing him a photo of his wife (wearing what appears to be a nightgown) while they're on a sniper mission. Unfortunately, he fails to spot the bullets being shot at him from a helicopter in time and dies on the spot.
One of the fresh recruits in Platoon shows photos of TWO girlfriends, so he's double dead (he dies on his first night). And while we're in Vietnam, lil' Laurence Fishburne's character in Apocalypse Now tries to avoid the curse by listening to a recording of his mom instead of looking at a photo, but it makes no difference. He still croaks on the same scene.
Remember, kids: when we go to war with the Venusians in 2035, leave the family holo-cubes at home!
The Devil Can't Pose As A Human Without Using Stupid "Punny" Names
Every time a movie features a character who's secretly Satan posing as a human being, they have to give him some terrible pun for a name, thus negating the "secretly" part. The protagonist in Angel Heart is hired by a totally-not-evil businessman called Louis Cyphre to track someone down. Somehow, it takes this brilliant investigator until the end of the movie to figure out that "Louis Cyphre" sounds like "Lucifer."
In the Liam Neeson/Pierce Brosnan western Seraphim Falls, both protagonists make deals with a mysterious traveling saleswoman called Louise C. Fair (Anjelica Huston), which ends up leading to their doom. Wait, does the "C" stand for Cypher? Is she Louis' ex-wife? Has the internet produced erotic fan fiction of them yet?
Al Pacino's name in The Devil's Advocate is a little less on the nose (John Milton, after the author of Paradise Lost), but then again this movie turns out to be about the Devil's literal advocate, so we can't give it any points for subtlety.
Speaking of lawyers who are even more evil than usual, the law firm in Angel apparently only hired attorneys with the same initials as "Lucifer Morningstar," like Lee Mercer (Season 1), Lindsey McDonald (Seasons 1-2, 5), Lilah Morgan (Seasons 1-4), and Linwood Murrow (Seasons 3-4). Yeah, they were running out of normal names starting with "L" by the end there.
And finally, if the upcoming Ghostbusters sequel takes any ideas from Dan Aykroyd's bonkers Ghostbusters 3 script, we might see a Trump-esque character called Lou Sifler who (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD) is also Satan. Or maybe they'll go with a plot twist that's actually surprising, like making it so the Trump stand-in is just a nice, well-adjusted human being with basic empathy.
Sci-Fi Characters Keep Naming Their (Doomed) Spaceships "Icarus"
We all know the myth of Icarus, the Greek genius who flew too close to the sun with wax wings and went when they melted. Well, either the following movies are set in a parallel reality where this story is vastly different, or everyone in them is a dumbass. The 007 film Die Another Day has an orbital satellite called Icarus, which turns out to be a giant death laser and ultimately fails (with some help from Bond).
In Sunshine, a ship called Icarus is sent to reignite the sun. It fails, obviously, so they send ... another ship called Icarus. This one works, but only after the crew throws it into the sun and kill themselves in the process. At least they spared Earth's scientists from having to send out Icarus III, Space Titanic, and S.S. This Ship Will Definitely Explode.
The show Babylon 5, too, has an exploratory ship called Icarus. It gets captured by aliens and explodes. Stargate Universe has Icarus Base, which blows up as well, along with the entire planet it was on. This one also has a cutesy sun-themed logo alluding to the fact that everyone in it will probably die.
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes shows us a news report about a spaceship called Icarus taking off, followed by a predictable headline about its disappearance. Of course, we know from the old movies that the ship (which had another name; "Icarus" was only a nickname) will travel in time, crash down on future ape-ruled Earth, and then there's a musical number about Dr. Zaius or something.
And Star Trek, despite being the wackiest of all these franchises, only had a shuttlecraft called Icarus in the comics. It's attacked by Klingons and luckily crashes down on a cornfield planet (planets are only allowed to be one thing in the Star Trek universe).
The fact that so many governments and institutions would name expensive spaceships after an arrogant jackass who fell to his death out of pure stupidity is completely unrealistic. People are smarter than that! Anyway, article over. We're going back to our favorite hobby, Not Looking At The News.
Maxwell Yezpitelok lives in Chile and also on Twitter.
Top Image: Marvel Studios
