Sitcoms are a staple for most mainstream TV channels. Whether reruns of long-ago ended shows or scheduled episodes of new ones, sitcoms almost guarantee viewers. And as the years go by, fan theories pile up about shared universes, character crossovers and imagined scenarios. Some of these theories are decidedly dark and include The Fresh Prince being dead, Phoebe imagining all 10 seasons worth of Friends episodes and the foursome from The Big Bang Theory planning to start an apocalypse.

On this list are 10 more far-out theories that have seen the light since the airing of some of the most popular sitcoms in history.

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10 Welcome to Jurassic Park

26 years ago, viewers worldwide were handed one of the bleakest sitcom series finales of all time. Dinosaurs, a show that was admittedly strange but also funny, ended with some of the characters sparking an Ice Age that led to the inevitable extinction of their species. Why did it happen? Because of greed and ongoing ignorance. Looking back now, this sad ending to a popular show foreshadowed what is happening in our time: bad decisions taking an extreme toll on our environment and ever-decreasing resources. The final line, “Goodnight. Goodbye.” is especially haunting.

Dinosaurs ran from 1991 to 1994 and while it didn’t spark a lot of fan theories at the time, there is one theory still circulating the depths of the internet. It states that the show is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which genetically engineered dinosaurs have taken over the planet after wiping out most of human civilization. The remaining humans are mostly hunters and are dominated by the super-intelligent dinosaurs.

Sound familiar? The theory is based on a “Jurassic Park”-type scenario and became popular after the movie’s release in 1993.

9 The truth about aliens revealed on Frasier

Frasier gave us 11 seasons of hilarity centered around two brothers, Frasier and Niles Crane. Originally, the show wouldn’t have focused on Frasier Crane, to avoid ‘unfair’ comparisons to its predecessor, Cheers. However, Paramount hated the original idea of Crane being a paralyzed media mogul and insisted on the show building on the existing Cheers audience. There are a few homages to Cheers in the script that made their way into the show throughout the seasons, and a lot of guest appearances by Cheers cast members.

A show that runs this long is bound to have a few theories attached to it and Frasier is no exception. Once of the craziest theories involves the late John Glenn’s cameo role during one of the show’s earlier episodes. Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth and he appears on Frasier Crane’s radio show as himself. He takes over the show and talks about his space experience. He then goes off on a humorous tangent about a government cover-up of the existence of aliens.

This let to many fans believing that Glenn wasn’t just playing a part on a show, but that he used the opportunity to reveal the truth about alien life.

8 Cheers is a rip-off

Cheers is where the above-mentioned Frasier Crane was first introduced, alongside a host of other beloved characters. Cheers ran for 11 seasons and premiered way back in 1982. It almost didn’t see its second season, however, as it was very nearly cancelled during its first airing.

There have been a multitude of theories surrounding the show including that the bar was a perfect place for Norm and Cliff to set up prostitutes with prospective clients. Another theory that gained a lot of traction is the one that claims the show is a rip-off of a lesser known sitcom called Park St. Under. This sitcom was produced for a local Boston audience and premiered three years before Cheers. Its focus was on an underground Boston bar owned by an ex-Red Sox player. The rest of the cast included a cheeky dark-haired employee, civil servant, token “old-timer” and a local psychiatrist.

Those who bought into the theory of Cheers being a rip-off of Park St. Under feel that these similarities are too obvious to ignore.

7 The Melmacians may have sparked a war

ALF, also known as Gordon Shumway, crash-landed on TV screens in September 1986. ALF is an alien from the planet Melmac with an appetite for cats to fill his eight stomachs. The show ran for 99 episodes and ended with a cliff-hanger that was only resolved when a TV movie was released in 1996. There were short-lived plans for a reboot in August 2018, but the idea was quickly scrapped.

There was also ALF: The Animated Series that aired between 1987 and 1989. This gave rise to a theory that connects ALF and the Melmacians to the tragedy that befell the ThunderCats from Thundera. The theory goes that the aliens of Melmac would have sent ships to planets other than Earth, including Thundera. Considering the Melmacians’ appetite for cats, they would have seen the ThunderCats as a food source. The ensuing conflict then led to a war giving rise to the evil Mumm-Ra.

6 Steve Harrington’s son

Parks and Recreation aired between 2009 and 2015 and had a reunion special on 30 April 2020. It is a political satire sitcom and have sparked a host of wild fan theories including Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) being extremely rich and Jerry Gergich being a cult leader. And who could forget the lasting theory that Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) is Andy from Toy Story because they share the same first name, love guitars and are both ‘childish’.

One of the crazier rumors however is the one that maintains Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) is the son of none other than Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) from Stranger Things. Both shows are set in Indiana, and the two characters do resemble each other in an uncanny way. Some fans have taken the theory even further by claiming that Pawnee, the town in which Parks and Rec is set, is an inversion of the Upside Down and that Jean-Ralphio is its resident Demogorgon.

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5 Balki was a sleeper agent

Perfect Strangers featuring Larry Appleton and his distant cousin, Balki Bartokomous, ran for 8 seasons. It spawned a successful spin-off, Family Matters, that aired between 1989 and 1998. Perfect Strangers introduced the “Dance of Joy” that co-stars Mark Linn-Baker and Bronson Pinchot performed one last time off-screen for the studio audience after the closing credits of the series finale in 1993.

This light-hearted sitcom attracted a very dark fan theory as some mused that Balki may have been a sleeper agent for a terrorist cell. This theory was built around the storyline that saw Balki arrive from the fictional island of Mypos, find a job at the Chicago Chronicle alongside his cousin, befriend a policeman and marry a flight attendant.

This all means, according to the theory, that Mypos could have been a part of Al Qaeda and that Balki could have garnered valuable information from the prominent newspaper, his police officer friend and his flight attendant wife whilst planning ‘the perfect terrorist attack.’

4 The Tanners are in limbo

One can’t think of Full House without picturing Jesse Katsopolis and his picture-perfect smile or the adorably cute Michelle Tanner played by both Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The show didn’t come without real-life controversy, though. Amongst other things, John Stamos was convicted of a DUI and entered a rehab facility. Jodie Sweetin admitted in 2006 that she had become addicted to meth shortly after the show ended in 1995. The adult actors sometimes got high on set and John Stamos wanted Mary-Kate and Ashley fired at one point.

The fan theories about the show are as dark as the controversies. Some believe that ‘Uncle Joey’ is the real father of Danny Tanner’s three daughters. Others claim that Michelle Tanner never existed, due to her noted absence in the reboot Fuller House. The theory has it that Michelle was invented as an imaginary daughter by Danny to cope with the grief of losing his wife.

The creepiest theory perhaps is the one that claims Pamela Tanner was the only one to survive the fatal car crash and that the Tanners are stuck in limbo with a demon in the form of Michelle keeping them from moving on. The ‘evidence’ comes in the form of Michelle convincing Jesse to stay at the Tanner’s house because she’s ‘sick’ and Danny’s love interests always disappearing to prevent him from moving on from Pam.

3 Susan faked her own death

Seinfeld is a love-it or hate-it kind of sitcom, but a list like this would be incomplete without mentioning at least one of its persistent fan theories. Once of the stranger rumors surrounding the show is the one that compares the characters to grown-up versions of the Peanuts characters, George as Charlie Brown, Elaine as Lucy, Jerry as Linus, and Kramer as either Pig-Pen or Snoopy.

There are theories that claim Kramer is a widow living off an inheritance from his deceased wife and coming up with outlandish business ideas to keep his mind off his grief. Or, according to fans, he could just be a drug dealer.

A dark theory involving George Costanza alleges that his fiancé, Susan, faked her own death with the help of her parents to escape a life with George. Her death on the show comes after she licked the toxic adhesive on cheap wedding invitation envelopes chosen by George.

2 Unofficial prequel

Married… with Children was once called the crudest comedy on primetime television by a parents’ advocacy group, because of the show’s outrageous and sometime shocking moments. This includes a drunken Santa parachuting into the Bundy family’s back yard and causing quite a stir by dying. There is also an episode dedicated to PMS and during another episode Al and Peggy are videotaped while getting busy in a motel. All of this added to the show’s ‘trashy’ reputation, but audiences loved it regardless.

Ed O’Neill, who played Al Bundy, went on to star in another sitcom: the hugely popular Modern Family. This soon led to a fan theory suggesting that Married… with Children is an unofficial prequel to Modern Family. Al Bundy, now Jay Pritchett, is divorced from Peggy and in a second marriage with Gloria Delgado-Pritchett. He had a son and daughter in Married… with Children and also has a son and daughter in Modern Family who some fans believe share similar traits across the two shows.

1 Organized crime syndicate… of old ladies

The Golden Girls premiered in September 1985 and received critical acclaim for the largest part of its 7-season run. The sitcom won several awards including an Emmy Award for each of its four main characters. The show ended after Bea Arthur made the decision to leave, and the finale was watched by more than 27 million viewers in May 1992. The heart of the show is the group of four older ladies, Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia, who share a home in Miami. Many hijinks and adventures ensue.

Michael Harriot from The Root has shared his own hilarious fan theory on Twitter, digging further into the show’s characters and its ‘hidden agenda’. Which, according to Harriot, is that the ladies were part of an organized crime syndicate.

His ‘evidence’ includes The Golden Girls debuting in 1985 which was the beginning of the crack cocaine epidemic. He also theorizes that Rose was the head of the organization and that she murdered her own husband for insurance money. Blanche’s father could have easily been a pimp, considering his outfits, mannerisms, and way of speaking. To top it all off, Blanche’s job as an art dealer could have provided the perfect cover for drug dealing.

Dorothy would have been the handler of day-to-day business and Sophia kept the police off their trail by burning down the nursing home she lived in.

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What are kid’s movies these days without a dark fan theory or two? What is happy ever after without a demonic twist? What is a cute fluffy monster without a bleak future? On this list are ten theories about some of the most popular kids movies that might just make you see them in a different light.

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10 Mufasa was the bad guy

“Can you feel the love tonight?”

That phrase will probably make you think of The Lion King first and then Elton John. The Lion King is known for catchy tunes and perhaps the saddest death scene in any kids movie, barring the demise of Bambi’s mother.

This beloved movie also has a host of fan theories surrounding it, some weird and some fairly dark. Some fans believe that The Lion King and Planet of the Apes have the same kind of future or that Nala is Scar’s daughter. There is also a theory that says Zazu was actually in cahoots with Scar to get rid of Simba.

One of the most persistent fan theories has it that Mufasa was the real bad guy, not Scar. According this theory, Mufasa banned all other male lions to ensure there is no one left to challenge him for the throne. He is physically superior to Scar, so he tolerates him. Therefore, when Mufasa was killed, Scar became an unlikely hero who saved the hyenas and became the ‘best ruler’ over the pride lands.^[1]

9 The Minions are based on adopted Jewish children

Minions are those little capsule-shaped minionese-speaking henchmen who can supposedly understand Spanish, English, French, Italian, Russian and Korean. Their design was inspired by Jawas and Oompa Loompas, and their colours (evil: purple, good: yellow) were inspired by the fact that yellow and purple are opposite to each other on the color spectrum.

A freaky theory connected these cute characters to Nazi experiments. The rumor had it that the Minions were inspired by Jewish children adopted by Nazi scientists who wanted to use them to practice their poison gas experiments on. To perpetuate the theory, a photo has been circulating the internet of what looks like children wearing Minion-type masks. Fortunately, it turned out that the photo has nothing to do with Jewish children being experimented on but is instead a photo of people in 1908 dressed in submarine escape suits.^[2]

8 Toothless got revenge on Hiccup

Toothless is just about the cutest dragon in a movie. He is a rare Night Fury species and is faster and more powerful than other dragon species. He is Hiccup’s best friend and is extremely protective of him. Toothless also has a special power in the form of ‘radar.’ When he issues a plasma blast and it bounces off his immediate location, it gives Toothless an accurate reading of the surrounding area.

In the first How To Train Your Dragon film, Toothless damages his wing when Hiccup shoots him from the sky. At the end of the film, Hiccup loses a foot. This gave rise to an almost immediate theory that Toothless had ripped off Hiccup’s foot in revenge for his damaged wing. The theory also says that this makes the two more dependent on each other, which is what Toothless ultimately wanted. Hiccup would have to keep using Toothless for transportation purposes and he would have to help Toothless fly without problems.^[3]

Another, slightly sweet, slightly less terrible theory has it that Toothless was desperately trying to save Hiccup during the final battle and he bit off his foot in his haste to get him to safety.

7 Moana is dead for most of the film

The Moana character has been described as a modern heroine who doesn’t need a male companion to help her navigate life. She decries the title of princess but revels in calling herself the daughter of the Chief. The movie also received high praise for its animation and musical performances.

In the movie, Moana can’t seem to stay away from the ocean, even as a toddler. She eventually braves the waves, befriends a demigod, has a crazy adventure and returns home to her family at the end. Or does she?

A dark theory has it that Moana actually dies during the storm that sees her wash ashore on Maui’s island. It states that there is a barrier between Moana’s world and that of Maui and the rest of the magical creatures that appear in the movie. In order to communicate with them, Moana either had to be magic herself or dead. Moana interacting with her dead grandmother and other long-gone spirits after the storm is said to be more ‘proof’ of this theory.^[4]

6 Sulley is turned into a toilet seat cover

Monsters, Inc. took the world by storm in 2001, becoming the third highest-grossing film of that year. The movie’s plot is centered around monsters from Monstropolis going into the human world at night to scare children and ‘harvest’ their screams. The energy of the screams power the city of Monstropolis. When a door on the ‘scare floor’ in the energy factory is left open, a human child enters Monstropolis and the main monster, Sulley, tries to get her back home.

The ‘villain’ of the story comes in the form of Randall who allegedly at one point tells Sulley that humans are dangerous and love slaying monsters because they turn their skins into toilet seat covers. Sulley naturally laughs this off as nonsense.

However, in Partysaurus Rex (a short film about the dinosaur from Toy Story), there is a bathroom scene depicting a toilet seat cover that looks suspiciously similar to Sulley’s fur… Coincidence?

Fortunately, this remains just a wild theory, considering the chat between Randall and Sulley never actually happened. Or did it?^[5]

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5 Personality traits absorbed into cars

Lightning McQueen is just about the cutest Corvette-looking car there is. Pixar crushed the box-office yet again in 2006 with Cars starring McQueen, a truck named Mack and several others, raking in over 460 million and receiving two Academy Awards nominations.

Much the same as with the other entries on this list, fans couldn’t leave well enough alone and came up with a decidedly disturbing theory about this beloved kid’s film. The theory starts off with questions including ‘why do the cars have doors if there are no people around’ and ‘if the cars have tongues, doesn’t that mean they also have internal organs?’

It then goes on to claim that the reason for the ‘no people around’ situation is because the cute little cars wiped out the human race and absorbed the personality traits of their owners.

Also, the reason the cars have doors is to keep their internal organs such as eyes and brains from tumbling out.^[6]

4 Rug made from Mama Bear

There have been a host of fan theories over the years about Shrek, the lovable green ogre, and his friends. These include Farquaad’s subjects being overjoyed when the overlord dies, Shrek being exiled from other ogres because he refused to eat human meat and Fiona living off the remains of dead knights.

Clearly that last bit wasn’t horrible enough for some fans, because another disturbing theory soon started making the rounds. This time involving the three bears that can be seen towards the beginning of the first Shrek movie. The three bears consist of ‘Mama Bear’, ‘Papa Bear’, and ‘Baby Bear.’ They are locked up in cages and are very unhappy.

Later in the film, Papa and Baby are sitting around a fire with some of the other fairytale creatures and Papa is consoling Baby. Mama Bear is nowhere to be seen.^[7]

Then… the unthinkable… a shot of Lord Farquaad’s castle reveals Mama Bear as a rug on the floor.

Luckily, the fact that she returns at the end of the film, to take part in the singing, seems to throw this theory out the window… except some fans believe the Mama Bear singing at the end isn’t ‘Mama’ at all. Instead she is the new lady in Papa Bear’s life.

3 Death before afterlife

With a title like The Nightmare Before Christmas, it probably wouldn’t take a lot to come up with some disturbing details for this movie. It was released in 1993 and was the first animated movie to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. The Nightmare Before Christmas was released through Touchstone Pictures, even though it is a Disney movie, because Disney feared that the film would be too scary for children. Considering what the characters look like, they may have had a point.

One theory surrounding the movie is that Sally, the ragdoll, was a witch when she was alive and was dismembered for it. This, according to the theory, would be why her limbs are stitched back together in the afterlife. Lock is said to have frozen to death, hence his white skin and blue lips, while Zero may have been electrocuted, hence his nose lighting up as if by electric current.^[8]

Some fans have also ruminated that Halloween Town’s citizens may represent basic human fears: Dr. Finkelstein represents the fear of aging while Jack represents the fear of death and Oogie Boogie fear of the dark.

2 What happened to Sven’s mom?

Frozen has had its fair share of wacky theories including Anna representing Summer and Elsa representing Winter (as in the seasons), Hans buying the stolen crown from Tangled’s Flynn, and Kristoff being Santa Clause. Not to mention the one that says Joan of Arc is an ancestor of Anna and Elsa.
And while all these theories are cool to think about and then forget, fans of the movies have come up with an incredibly dark theory that is bound to stick around for a while.

Throughout both films, there is evidence of a very strong friendship between Sven and Kristoff. They grew up together and stuck by each other’s side through thick and thin. When you take the time to think about it, you may start wondering what happened to Sven’s mother and what would have caused him to be with Kristoff instead of his own family.

Well, according to the aforementioned theory, the ice harvesters killed Sven’s mother, handed baby Sven over to young Kristoff to look after and then gave Kristoff a pelt to wear… made from the mother’s fur.^[9]

According to the theory this would also be part of why Sven loves Kristoff so much: the smell of the pelt reminds him of his mother.

1 Kingdom called Corona

Some theories are more intricately tangled than others. Tangled the movie has been the centre of many such rumors, including that it is linked to Frozen and The Little Mermaid. One of these have it that Elsa and Anna’s parents were on their way to Rapunzel and Flynn’s wedding when their ship went down. Ariel and Flounder then came across the shipwreck in The Little Mermaid.

Another far-out theory reared its head on social media in 2020: Tangled predicted the current coronavirus pandemic.^[10]

But…how, you may ask. Well, since Rapunzel is locked away (read: quarantined) from her kingdom (called Corona) is any more proof needed that this 2010 animation film somehow predicted the disaster that is 2020?

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Question: what do the Nobel Prize, ASPCA, Planned Parenthood and Batman all have in common? The answer is their shockingly dark origin stories. It turns out that it’s not just violent vigilantes who have to deal with a tortured past; some of our most beloved organizations are burdened with a history more befitting The Punisher than a respected charity. I’m talking organisations like:

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Planned Parenthood is a charity dedicated to women’s reproductive rights. Without getting into the politics of it, most of us can at least agree that their work with contraception and cervical screening has a positive impact—despite the fact that their organization was founded by a genocidal racist.

It’s true, Margaret Sanger was as crazy as they come; her 1932 paper My Way to Peace cheerfully categorizes the world into countries whose people have “the national characteristics desirable” and those whose people don’t. She was also a rampant eugenicist, with an abhorrence of physical, moral and mental “defectives,” who she campaigned to have segregated, sterilized and sent to work on “farms.”

Her list of defectives, by the way, included paupers, epileptics, the unemployed, and people who couldn’t read; all in all, she estimated that the USA needed to segregate five million of its citizens. Even her charitable work on birth control was promoted to “improve the quality of the race”; proof that sometimes the best things come from the worst places.

Without the ASPCA, we’d probably still have cockfighting, unregulated slaughterhouses, and no penalties for animal cruelty. Please bear that in mind while you read the next bit.

In 1894, the charity began operating New York’s municipal animal shelter, a service they provided for one hundred years. During that time they managed to make it probably the most murderous animal shelter in the history of the world. At its peak, forty to fifty thousand stray animals were destroyed each year—a level of extermination so vast that it probably would probably have depopulated the world of dogs if left unchecked.

Things got so bad that in 1976 two members of the charity’s own board sued it for animal cruelty. Just to clarify, this is the same charity that named itself “American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.” It wasn’t until 1994 that the charity finally ended their annual bloodbath, handing the reigns over to ACC; who promptly lowered the annual euthanasia rate to a less-terrifying 8,000.

It may not exactly be “beloved,” but the Department of Energy does its job. Without it we’d have no domestic power, Human Genome Project, or possibility of nuclear annihilation.

That’s not a joke. Before they got into the day-to-day business of government, the Department’s only remit was to build a city-vaporizing bomb. See, before the Cold War even got started, the race was on to perfect a nuclear weapon. The British, Germans and Americans were all busy trying to crack the Konami Code of WWII and it was pretty clear whoever got there first would win the game.  To make sure it wasn’t the Nazis, the US government set up the Manhattan Project, a top secret project employing almost as many people as the car industry. After the war, the project changed hands and names, eventually metamorphosing into the innocuous-sounding Department of Energy.

Everyone reading this remembers Kony. He’s the brutal, child-soldier-using warlord the world was going to take down by watching youtube videos. The closest our post-Stalin world has to a bona-fide monster, there’s no way any charity that stood up to him could be accused of something as base as rank hypocrisy.

Except, of course it could. As one expert on international conflict in the Congo region pointed out, Kony’s LRA were not the only army to exploit child soldiers and massacre civilians. The Ugandan President has been implicated in the sort of war crimes nobody wants to read about on a family site, as has the SPLA; both of whom Invisible Children are involved with. Supporters say it’s a necessary evil that doesn’t detract from their mission, though how supporting the very thing you stand against constitutes “fulfilling your mission” is anyone’s guess.

Aside from Gandhi, Mother Teresa is probably the figure most commonly associated with words like “good” and “selfless.” She reached out to the homeless, took tea with lepers, raised astronomical amounts of money for her Missionaries of Charity, and generally lived her life as the perfect Christian. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, she also palled around with some of the nastiest figures of her day. Just as Gandhi once obsequiously referred to Hitler as his “friend”, Mother Teresa had no qualms about accepting money from “Papa Doc,” the murderous Haitian leader; or Charles Keating, the American fraudster who gifted her charity more than $1 million of other people’s savings; savings the Missionaries never returned.

But hey, that money was probably going to people who deserved it, right? Think again. A 1991 report alleged that the Missionaries gave only seven percent of donations to those whom they supported, while the rest went to building new missions. All this might even be forgivable, were it not for the horrific accounts of negligence in the Calcutta mission. According to this report, volunteers often lacked any medical training, resulting in deaths that could have easily been avoided. Depressing proof, if needed, that nobody’s perfect.

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of PEW. Basically, they’re a non-partisan NGO who get their kicks improving public policy and protecting the environment. Oh, and they were established by a bunch of free-market psychos.

Before anyone gets offended, let me add that supporting a free-market economy is as valid a position as any other. On the other hand, claiming Roosevelt’s New Deal was “a gigantic scheme to raze US businesses to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs” crosses that hazy line from “opinionated” to “insane.” Set up by the children of oil tycoon Joseph N. Pew, the PEW Trust spent the first years of its life vigorously campaigning for unrestricted drilling rights and such-like, before undergoing a Scrooge-like change of heart and becoming staunch environmentalists.

While Mensa was officially founded after a chance meeting on a train, the idea of a club for clever people had first been floated by Cyril Burt in 1946. Earlier in life, Burt was a member of the British Eugenics Society; a group of doctors, scientists, and teachers concerned with “preserving the virility of the Anglo-Saxon race”.

This isn’t just a tenuous connection either; one of Mensa’s two founding fathers openly acknowledged Burt’s influence and the society made him honorary president. Of course, this was all years ago and Mensa has no truck with eugenics now—apart from that brief period in 1995 when their newsletter suggested the homeless “be humanely done away with, like abandoned kittens”.

For most people, receiving a Nobel Prize is probably the highest accolade they can imagine. Forget the Oscars and the Pulitzers—a Nobel Prize tells the world that you’re not only fantastic, but that you’re fantastic for the common good. What sort of living saint would set up such a philanthropic award?

How about one nicknamed “The Merchant of Death”? Before dedicating his fortune to encouraging awesomeness, Alfred Nobel was foremost an inventor; and foremost among his inventions was dynamite. When it came time to print his obituary in 1888, a French newspaper recognized his contribution to suffering by running the headline “The Merchant of Death is Dead.”

Except here’s the kicker: he wasn’t. The paper had jumped the gun and Alfred was alive and well enough to read his premature obituary and become obsessed by it. So obsessed, in fact, that he decided to set up the Nobel Prize specifically to protect his future reputation from sneering French obituary writers.

Being a homeless child in Victorian London wasn’t all jolly songs and artful dodges; for every wise-cracking scamp there were roughly a gazillion scared and hungry kids at perpetual risk of exploitation. In 1867, philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo decided enough was enough; he was going to help Britain’s orphans, even if he had to kidnap healthy children from happy families to do so. Wait, what?

Turns out Dr Barnardo had a pretty broad definition of what constituted “help”; while sometimes this involved rehousing homeless kids, other times it involved abducting infants from their godless Catholic parents. See, for Barnardo, abuse and Catholicism were interchangeable. Over the course of his life he snatched and sent thousands of otherwise-happy kids to Canada or Australia, usually without even bothering to inform their parents. For those of us not familiar with the finer points of Victorian law, this was very much illegal; Barnardo was hauled into court eighty-eight times on related charges, but each time the case was dropped. Oh yeah, and that ‘Dr’ at the front of his name? He totally made that up.

Lord Baden-Powell was as old-time British as they come: tough, adventurous, terrified of masturbation and probably gay. In 1908 he published the aptly-titled book ‘Scouting for Boys’ and the rest is history; except for the part where he supported Hitler.

I kid you not. Baden-Powell’s 1939 diary includes the immortal line “Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book.” Throughout the thirties he continued to hand out Swastika badges, way beyond the point it was advisable to be seen in public wearing one; while in 1937 he met the German ambassador in London to discuss forging closer ties between the Scouts and Hitler Youth.

If that wasn’t enough, MI5 even have him on record moaning about the difficulties he faced with the “socialist press when our boys had appeared in uniform at a fascist demonstration”. So to surmise, the founder of the Scouts was a sexually repressed admirer of Hitler who gave swastikas to children and supported Nazi Germany. Way to ruin our childhoods, history.

At this point, writing a script for a film or an episode of television should be down to an exact science. Even people with a passing interest in scripts know about phrases such as inciting incidents, peaks and valleys, and denouncements, and even without popular webpages like IMDb goofs or the endless ranks of video essayists on YouTube, we can sniff out a hole in a plot.

So knowing audiences have that level of savvy, how can filmmakers that have to devote months, if not years to these projects think that they can get away with having holes in stories that seem like they would take a conscious effort to ignore? On top of that, how do they sometimes not only get away with it but make movies and episodes that audiences cherish for generations? Perhaps we can gain some insight into that by looking at the stories below. All 10 examples are, we should mention, movies and episodes that we love enough to have watched multiple times. Still, you can’t really love something until you accept its flaws.

(By the way, if you’re expecting Citizen Kane and its infamous supposed plot hole to be on here, check this page for why it isn’t. Also, SPOILERS ahead!)

10. Avengers: Infinity War

In the fourth movie in world history to gross over two billion dollars at the box office, the villain Thanos wants to become so powerful that he can, at a stroke, kill half the universe’s population to provide more resources for the other half. Aside from how nonsensical that is (think how many systems of producing and distributing the needed resources would be practically wiped out, how traumatized many of the survivors would be, etc.) considering he can do whatever he wants with time, space, reality, and so on, it also means that he can provide infinite resources to everyone. So why would he kill half the population to deal with alleged shortages?

However, some might try to dismiss that by claiming it’s part of his insanity. In terms of sheer plot mechanics, there’s a less high-falutin example near the end of the movie. The hero Doctor Strange possesses a green stone which allows him to, among other things, reset time for at least a short period. This was demonstrated quite memorably in the climax of Doctor Strange. Yet after a confrontation with Thanos late in the movie, he allows himself and his associates to be defeated without employing this power at all, despite the loss being an extremely near-run matter. There’s a common trope among superhero stories of the heroes “forgetting” their powers, but rarely does it go that far.   

9. Get Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJd2sPSVKVg

While the meticulous plotting of Get Out‘s screenplay required twenty drafts and resulted in Jordan Peele receiving the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, he left an unfortunate hole in the story that’s as much unnecessary as it’s a cheat.   

The basic plot of the film is that Chris goes with his girlfriend Rose to visit her parents’ home. While there, he encounters a person from his neighborhood who is now in a relationship with a much older woman. Since he and other black people that Chris has encountered have been acting weirdly, he is deeply suspicious, even before he receives confirmation from his friend Rod that, indeed, the person he just met has been listed as a missing person, just as numerous other black people in that neighborhood have been. Shortly after, Chris discovers a box in the closet of the bedroom he and Rose have been sleeping in. It is full of photos of Rose with a large number of black boyfriends and girlfriends, including the person Chris knew was missing, revealing that something profoundly wrong is happening.

The issue is this: Why does Rose have that very incriminating box of evidence where Chris could find it? In the following scenes, it’s revealed that Rose is a willing participant in the disappearances and feels no remorse. Indeed, we see her casually looking through photos of up and coming athletes shortly after, indicating that she’s already moving on from the harm she’s going to inflict on Chris, so it’s not as if she’d subconsciously be sabotaging the crime. They’re also printed photos even though the movie is set in contemporary times when surely she would be inclined through social conditioning to take digital photographs. Even the best screenplays can’t seem to escape these missteps.  

8. Black Mirror: National Anthem

Often hailed as The Twilight Zone for the internet age, Charlie Brooker’s science fiction anthology struck a chord with audiences from its pilot episode, which premiered in December 2011. In the episode, Princess Susannah is kidnapped by an unknown person who will only release her alive on the condition that the prime minister do something by that late afternoon that the prime minister very much does not want to do, with the full understanding of the public. One of his subordinates makes arrangements to cheat the arrangement in the event Princess Susannah is not rescued in time. Word of the attempted cheat gets out, so the kidnapper releases a video of him removing one of the Susannah’s fingers, and he sends a finger to the press. Learning about this cheat and the harm inflicted on the Princess turns the public against the prime minister, forcing him to go through with the deal. In the end, it’s revealed that the princess is released unharmed and that the kidnapper was an old performance artist who cut off one of his own fingers.

The issue with that is that the performance artist is revealed to be an aged man with a generally working class body while Princess Susannah looks like she’s a model in lower middle age, at the oldest. There’s no way their fingers could plausibly be mistaken for each other, even in the heat of the moment. Even if the extent of the news that leaked was that a finger was sent to a media outlet after the video of the supposed finger removal (which is staged so that the injury itself does not happen in the camera’s line of sight), word would just as quickly get out that it wasn’t her finger, which would massively undercut the public pressure for the prime minister to meet the kidnapper’s demands.    

7. Cinderella

While it is a tale as old as time, most viewers today are probably familiar with it through either the 1951 animated Disney adaptation or the 2014 live action Disney adaptation. Or maybe the 2014 deconstruction in Into the Woods by… uh, Disney again. Our readers very likely don’t need the plot synopsized, but in brief: There’s a hardworking stepdaughter/maid who sneaks to a royal dance after her fairy godmother gives her a dress, carriage, and slippers made of her old clothes, a pumpkin, and magic respectively. She dances with the prince, they fall in love but she has to leave at midnight, leaving her slipper behind. He hunts her down by having every woman in the kingdom try on the slipper until it fits her.

But this story, whether it be the original French version, the German version by the Brothers Grimm, and every film adaptation, has a major problem related to the character of the prince. It doesn’t even make sense by fairy tale logic that the prince loves someone without even knowing what she looks like. Even the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet knew each other’s faces! While fairy tales naturally get deconstructed a lot despite being wish fulfillment fantasies for children, everyone always seems to get too hung up on how impractical glass slippers would be as an article of clothing to observe this problem with the plot.   

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

This 1981 film was both a tribute to 1930s movie serials (even though creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg admitted they didn’t actually like those when they screened a few for each other during pre-production) and one of the films that codified Hollywood’s blockbuster era. Indiana Jones was instantly iconic as a tomb raiding academic who goes on an adventure to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant  in a race against his old rival Belloq and his Nazi collaborators.

It probably helped that in Lawrence Kasdan’s acclaimed screenplay, Indiana Jones is more relatable because he so often fails on the way to the climax, including said climax beginning with him in captivity.

This is where the trouble with the story emerges. As Indiana and his fellow captive Marion Ravenwood look on, the Nazis open the Ark. Ominous light emenates from the Ark, and out of the blue, Indiana Jones tells Marion to shut her eyes. As they do, angels that seem more like demons emerge and kill all of their captors. Never mind the moral issues that they indiscriminately kill everyone solely on the basis of looking at them. How does Indiana know that shutting their eyes is the way for him and Marion to save themselves? The only thing he’s said about it before this scene was when, back at the university, he sees an image of the Ark and blithely guesses that the light emerging from it is the “power of God.” It’s a very puzzling oversight.

Except it actually isn’t. Kasdan included a scene in the original screenplay where the means of surviving was explained to Dr. Jones, but it was cut during editing. Which just goes to show that even a perfect script can be undone during the production process.

5. Black Mirror: USS Callister

After six years and a move from BBC to Netflix, the premiere for Black Mirror’s fourth season once again left audiences in awe and slightly disturbed. In brief, the episode is about the creator of a virtual reality online video game named Robert Daly. Instead of merely playing his game (which is modeled in large part on a fictional equivalent of the original Star Trek series) as a light adventure as originally intended, Daly makes artificially intelligent copies of coworkers and tortures them into treating him as essentially a god. Part of Black Mirror’s conceit was well-established by that time that AI simulations of people have the equivalents of physical sensations and emotions, thus making the AI in this show as sympathetic as any human beings would be and their existences just as Hellish.

Still, a problem with the story is revealed almost immediately. To properly map out the memories and emotions of his coworkers to make the simulations as accurate as possible, Daly sneaks samples of their DNA home from work from such things as discarded styrofoam cups. The issue of that is that while Daly would indeed have good DNA samples to make clones, in real life he wouldn’t be able to make replicas required by the narrative because our DNA does not contain our memories. It’s a testament to the execution of the episode that this did not seem to take many viewers out of the experience.

4. A Quiet Place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh-trhU24sI

A Quiet Place, the directorial debut from John Krasinski, is a commercial and critical darling. However, its suspenseful pace and limited dialogue left audiences with plenty of time to nitpick the details of its story about monsters that rely on sound to hunt down a family. The biggest issue is really a nail that is sticking up from the middle of a step to the basement that Evelyn Abbott steps on. Now, the nail is sticking up right from the middle of the step, and the staircase is in good condition, so this is not a matter of rushed or improvised repair after the apocalypse. It also is not joining two pieces of wood together. So why in the world is it there? Perhaps the deaf daughter Regan Abbott put it there because she’s subconsciously becoming suicidal (that’s extrapolating from how she blames herself for the death of her young brother and wants to stop experimenting with hearing aids). That still leaves a nagging question: How did it get pounded in without an immediate monster attack?

The producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form were questioned about the nail and the best they came up with was saying that the family couldn’t risk the noise of removing a nail. Which… Fine. But why, or even how, did they get it there in the first place?!

3. Hereditary

While there are many that are contemptuous of this horror hit (hence the fact the influential audience test score called Cinemascore gave it a D+), those that view it favorably tend to be passionate about it. It is deliberate in its pacing and unpredictability, and its art design is as subtly creepy as it is beautiful. Near the beginning, a family learns that a recently departed grandmother’s grave has been desecrated and things… well, they get even more grisly and disturbing from there, including the death of of the main character’s young daughter, Charlie, which culminates in a truly horrifying ending.

While it could be fairly said that writer-director Ari Aster attempted a much more grounded form of occult horror, he still left some substantial holes in the story. Staci Wilson of At Home in Hollywood pointed out that the cemetery calls the family to inform them of the desecration. However, later in the movie Charlie’s remains are also seen, and the movie devotes time to seeing her burial. So how is the family not being told about this desecration? How are the police not being informed of it? With a clear connection between the two desecrated graves, why are the police not investigating the family? Aster has to really fill the runtime with unsettling imagery to keep the viewer’s mind off matters like that.

2. The Dark Knight Rises

While it might not have achieved the heights of critical hype and commercial success of 2008’s The Dark Knight, this 2012 film still made quite an impression with its story of how Bane practically paralyzes the billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne and conquers the city of Gotham. It makes Bruce’s eventual recovery and triumph all the more compelling, especially with how costly it was in the end. And for this entry, we’re going to go ahead and ignore the well-established plot hole of how Bruce somehow got halfway around the world and snuck into Gotham despite being, at this point, a former billionaire with no resources.

However, one of the greatest problems with the story was that Bruce Wayne recovering from his injury and going through the spiritual journey that allows him to go confront Bane again on more favorable terms takes five months. Can you imagine any administration allowing a city to fall into the hands of criminals to such an extent that people physically cannot enter the city? We can just see some commenters saying something like “sure, look at Chicago, New Orleans, etc,” but you know what we mean. Even in a series where urban crime is to an extent decided by costumed heroes and villains having fistfights, that’s just silly. Silly in a way that the movies directed by Christopher Nolan have tried their hardest not to be. 

1. The Sixth Sense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8SlYqBOX8

One of the biggest hits of 1999 and the possessor of perhaps the most famous twist in modern cinema history, this film had members of entertainment media predicting that M. Night Shyamalan would be the next Steven Spielberg. We’ll see if his recent hit Split will put him back on course to achieving that honor, but we can always appreciate his story of a child who could see the many ghosts that walk among us. One or two oft-parodied scenes dominate most people’s memories of this film, but there’s a particularly touching scene where Cole Sear conquers his fear of ghosts by helping bring closure to the ghost of Kyra Collins.

Problem with it is that Kyra’s sequence brings with it all sorts of problems. For one thing, it’s said of the ghosts that “they see what they want to see,” so why is she the only one who’s aware she’s dead? There’s also the fact that the way she imparts the truth to Cole for him to pass on to her father is by pushing a VHS tape out from under her bed when he goes to her house during the funeral. But if Collins is aware she’s dead, and has apparently already watched the tape (otherwise she wouldn’t know that it has the information that would identify her murderer on it), then she must be able to move the tape around considerably. So what’s to stop her from just showing it to her father herself without seeking out Cole Sear? Like the rest of these, it’s hardly a movie ruining problem, but it’s enough to make you wonder how such inconsistency was never picked up by critics or harped on during the years-long Shyamalan backlash.

Dustin & Adam Koski also wrote the urban fantasy novel Not Meant to Know. It probably has plot holes in it, but you’ll have to read it to find them!