A black hole is a mysterious and hungry creature. But they do more than just consume anything that comes too close. Black holes are behind the biggest explosion in space, shoot boomerangs, and create their own planets.

They also harbor strange mysteries. When black holes die, what happens to everything they ate? Why did a black hole flash in 2019 when science argues that they cannot flash? New discoveries could have spectacular answers.

10 Mind-Blowing Things Black Holes Do (Other Than Suck)

10 A Star Turned Into Space-Pasta

A star perished in 2019. One half blew into space. A black hole shredded the other half into long tendrils and munched them. This coined the foody phrase of “death by spaghettification.” As peculiar as that was, the event was also unique for reasons other than deserving a dollop of pasta sauce.

When a star dies, it releases a flash of energy known as a tidal disruption event. In this case, it was both the closest tidal event near Earth (215 million light-years away) and the clearest. Once astronomers detected it, they watched for months—in incredible detail—how the black hole tore the star in half.

The devastation revealed a clue about where tidal flashes come from. While the whole story is still a bit hazy, they are definitely connected to the debris leaking from a failing star.^[1]

9 This Black Hole Shoots Boomerangs

Around 17,000 light-years from Earth, a black hole is nibbling on a star. The pair is simply known as XTE J1550-564. At first, there was nothing surprising about them. Black holes snack on starlight. Old news. But in 2020, researchers looked at old X-ray images of XTE J1550-564 and something did not add up.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of the strange data, the information was fed into a computer simulation. It revealed how some of the light made a dash for freedom. This, in itself, was not unusual. When light is trapped in the accretion disk (the dust swirl around a black hole), then it can still get away. But the light that escaped from XTE J1550-564 did something strange.

Normally, when light makes a successful escape, it bounces against the disk and then shoots into space in a straight line. But these beams first curled back towards the black hole. When the light eventually reflected off the disk, they looked like boomerangs. The phenomenon had not been seen before or since.^[2]

8 Black Holes Hide In Plain Sight

Some black holes are shrouded in dark dust. These so-called cocooned black holes are tough to spot but by any estimate, there should be crowds of them out there.

In 2020, scientists combed through the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) image to find more cocoons. This X-ray picture covers a section of the southern sky in great detail. Many things in CDF-S had already been identified, including 28 points that were listed as galaxies or black holes without cocoons.

But the 28 were imposters.

Not for long, though. When the chart was compared to optical and infrared observations of the same area, their bright signals were undeniably those of black holes with cocoons. The X-ray could not pierce the dimming effect of the dust which explained why they resembled other stellar objects. The discovery also suggests that plenty of records, similar to CDF-S, are probably littered with these black holes that masquerade as something else.^[3]

7 A Unique Trio

Back in 1983, astronomers considered NGC 6240 something of an odd pickle. The galaxy had a strange shape and an unusual infrared glow. The wisdom of the day concluded that NGC 6240 was actually two galaxies. The peculiar shape and brightness showed that they were colliding.

Each galaxy brought their own supermassive black hole along. By the time they were spotted, the black holes hovered closely together at the centre of NGC 6240.

2019 swung by and astronomers looked at the galaxies with better equipment. They were surprised to find a third black hole at the centre. Their peers from the 80s probably missed it because the black hole was dormant (the other two consumes matter). But whatever the reason, its presence suggested that the merger involved three galaxies.

A triple galactic smash is chicken-tooth rare but not unheard of. What makes this situation so unique is the closeness of the three black holes. They orbit each other inside a small area of 3,260 light-years and the active pair is barely 645 light-years apart.^[4]

6 A Clue That Explains The Oldest Black Holes

A mystery surrounds the earliest black holes. Thought to be the remnants of the first stars that had died, nothing could explain why some of these black holes grew into huge objects. Indeed, when one was discovered in 2020, it weighed 1 billion times the mass of our Sun. But being born soon after the Big Bang was not what made this guy special. It provided a strong clue about its own growth and size.

The black hole is holding six galaxies hostage. The setup resembles a spider’s web with filaments running between the black hole and the galaxies. Wherever the filaments cross, the galaxies prosper. Whatever feeds them (probably gas) is being funnelled by the threads. In the same way, the web can inflate black holes to enormous proportions by nurturing them inside a gas-rich environment.^[5]

Top 10 Bizarre New Finds About Black Holes

5 The Biggest (And Weirdest) Space Explosion

In 2019, something from space rattled the Earth. Two observatories detected the gravitational waves and homed in on the source. What they found was something bizarre, record-breaking, and impossible.

The signal, labelled GW190521, was produced when two black holes collided 7 billion years ago. The explosion created a single, bigger black hole. Curiously, one of the original two was most likely also the result of a merger between other black holes. But this cosmic pile-up was not the only strange thing.

The explosion was the most powerful blast ever recorded in space. The force equalled a million billion A-bombs detonating every second for 13.8 billion years. The final black hole was 142 times bigger than the Sun, making it an intermediate-sized black hole. This was significant because black holes of this size had previously only been possible in theory. But one of the original pair was plainly impossible.

Calculated at roughly 85 solar masses, it broke a scientific law stating that no black hole could exist in that range. In order to form, it would need a star between 60 and 130 times larger than the Sun. But therein lies the problem. When these stars die, they go out as supernovas and not as black holes.^[6]

4 Something Destroyed A Black Hole’s Corona

Things went normal for a while. A galaxy named 1ES 1927+654 swirled around a black hole, as most galaxies do. The black hole was visible due to its corona (a ring of hot particles that orbit most supermassive black holes). There was nothing special about it.

1ES 1927+654 did not like being ignored. In 2018, it gave astronomers a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. For some reason, the black hole’s corona flared forty times its normal brightness. Then, just as suddenly, the flash was gone.

The galaxy got its wish. Telescopes from all over the world turned to 1ES 1927+654, hoping to see more. They were not disappointed. In less than a year, the corona dimmed at a rate that should have taken millennia. While the experts were unprepared for such a speedy version, they had a feeling that this was not a quicker-than-normal life cycle. Something else was destroying the corona.

According to one theory, a star collided with the black hole. The star cracked open like an egg, which caused the initial flash. The smash disrupted the black hole’s magnetic field, the very thing holding the corona together. Robbed of its stability, the corona then rapidly fell apart and caused the black hole to darken.^[7]

3 The Flash Mystery

Remember GW190521, the biggest and weirdest space explosion of all time? Something else happened about a month later in the same region and researchers are not sure whether the two events are connected. The black holes that collided had no fiery coronas, so nothing about the crash should have been visible.

But there was a massive flash.

To solve the riddle, researchers added a quasar to the story. Quasars are supermassive black holes that release blasts of energy. But the flash was too spectacular, even for one of these giants.

Instead, the theory goes that the two smaller black holes became trapped in the gas ring that surrounds their supermassive cousin. At one point, the pair merged and created the GW190521 signal. The force of the merger kicked the new black hole through the ring and disturbed the gas enough to trigger a delayed reaction (the flare).

This explains why the flash happened 34 days after the GW190521 signal but nothing is certain. There is an equal chance that the two events have nothing to do with each other.^[8]

2 They Have Blanets

Planets are born from the wheel of dust that swirls around a star. Blanets, on the other hand, are worlds that form inside the dust ring that orbits a black hole. Some blanets are rocky and Earth-like but nearly 10 times bigger. Others are gas giants like Neptune.

Blanets have never been found.

But a study in 2020 showed that the strange worlds must exist. A requirement for planet-building is ice. Acting like a glue, ice makes dust particles stick together. Once a clump develops enough gravity, it pulls more dust and other clumps together. Eventually, the object grows into a planet.

Some black holes have a “snow line.” Beyond this region, things are cold enough for ice and blanets to form. In the Milky Way, the conditions are so perfect that thousands of blanets are probably orbiting the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.^[9]

1 Black Holes Release Their Victims As Curves

When Stephen Hawking announced that black holes die, other physicists were excited to learn everything they could about the phenomenon’s life cycle. Then the leading expert on black holes, Hawking claimed that black holes evaporate. But this led to a seemingly unanswerable question.

When a black hole nears the end of its life and disintegrates, what happens to all the stuff it had consumed?

Mathematicians uncapped their whiteboard markers and did a few calculations. They concluded that the stolen “information” simply disappears—which violated about a gazillion sacred laws in physics. Another theory suggested that the information leaked back into space as curves. But nobody could prove things either way.

Recently, physicists turned to advanced computers and mathematical tools to solve the standoff. They created realistic black holes, sped up their evolution and watched their deaths closely. This was only a simulation but incredibly, it matched one of the theories. When the black holes neared their doom, the information seeped from them in curves.^[10]

10 Eerie Theories On What Happens Inside A Black Hole

Outer space is home to all manner of weird and wonderful objects—neutron stars, nebulae, galaxy clusters. Among the most fascinating are black holes. Since German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild first predicted their existence in 1916, researchers have amassed a wealth of knowledge about the elusive giants.

As astronomy becomes more and more advanced, scientists begin to learn more about the nature of black holes. Magnetic swirls, jets of radio waves, wormhole theories, record-breaking explosions. Over the last few years, stargazers have seen it all and have begun answering some of the questions others have posed.

Related: 10 Comets That Have Gone Missing

10 Unprecedented Glimpse of Light behind a Black Hole

Black holes are cosmic goliaths that guzzle up anything and everything that crosses their path. Their gravitational attraction is so immense that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. So you would expect that it would be impossible to detect light from behind a black hole. Surely any emissions would have been sucked in, right?

Albert Einstein disagreed. In 1915, the German scientist proposed that extremely heavy objects like black holes should distort the fabric of time and space, allowing light to travel around them. This was a key part of his theory of general relativity, an idea which revolutionized modern physics. Scientists have spotted this effect—known as gravitational lensing—before, but nobody had ever managed to detect light from behind a black hole until recently.

Then, in July 2021, astronomers at Stanford University cracked it. The team had been examining a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy called Zwicky when they noticed strange X-ray emissions that they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. They were used to detecting signals from in front of the black hole, but these new ones were different. These flashes showed up later, and the light was less bright, like echoes arriving after the main burst. After much analysis, the researchers confirmed that these mysterious detections were, in fact, pulses of light that had arced round the edge of Zwicky’s black hole, once again validating Einstein’s ground-breaking theory of relativity.^[1]

9 Astronomers Capture Magnetic Swirls around the Rim of a Black Hole

In 2019, astronomers made history when they released the first image of the outskirts of a black hole. Black holes themselves are impossible to photograph. The trailblazing snap captured the shadow of M87*, a supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away. Scientists compiled the photograph using data from a global network of detectors known as the Event Horizon Telescope.

Two years later, in another never-before-seen feat of science, the team unveiled a new photograph, providing yet more crucial insight into the mysterious behavior of the celestial behemoths. Finally, in March 2021, researchers revealed another image of M87*, only this time showing magnetic field lines spiraling around its shadow.

Black holes like M87* are surrounded by a glowing ring of hot cosmic matter. Scientists analyzed the light from this region and the direction of the vibrations. Black holes are known to spit out vast jets of matter, but no one is sure why. Scientists hope that the magnetic swirls could help explain this peculiar phenomenon.^[2]

8 Observatories Detect Record-Breaking Explosion

In 2016, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory began picking up unusual readings from the depths of outer space. The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, some 390 million light-years away, appeared to contain a strange curve. At first, scientists dismissed the idea of it being caused by a black hole because the sheer amount of energy involved seemed to be too immense to be true.

But as more data came in, the evidence began to stack up. Eventually, NASA realized that they had discovered, in their words, the “biggest explosion seen in the universe.”

Galaxy clusters are some of the largest known structures in the universe. They are made up of thousands of galaxies, dark matter, and hot gas. Toward the middle of the Ophiuchus cluster lies a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole. Scientists reckon the colossal blast could have stemmed from that gigantic space guzzler. The energy released in the explosion is said to be five times more powerful than the previous record-holder, a vast eruption in the MS 0735+74 galaxy cluster.

Simona Giacintucci, the lead author of the study, compared the blast to the 1980 eruption that tore the top off Mount Saint Helens. “A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”^[3]

7 Shape-Shifting Objects Lurking near the Milky Way’s Black Hole

In recent years, astronomers have noticed several strange shape-shifting objects skulking away in the Milky Way. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, discovered them circling the black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The ones furthest from the black hole seem to be the most compact. But they begin to stretch as they approach the event horizon.

These bizarre globules of gas have been dubbed G objects. Scientists reckon they form when two stars are merged together by the black hole’s immense gravitational pull.

Scientists have spotted six mutating G objects in the Milky Way, although there may be more elsewhere in the universe. Nobel Prize winner Andrea Ghez came across the first G object back in 2005. But it was seven years before researchers in Germany discovered the second.^[4]

6 Supermassive Black Holes Could Be Wormholes in Disguise

Wormholes are cosmic tunnels that weave across space, transporting travelers to anywhere in this universe and possibly into others. Over a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein explained that wormholes could exist, but nobody knows for sure if they actually do.

For years, astronomers have searched the skies for evidence to confirm or reject the existence of wormholes. But in November 2020, researchers published a paper suggesting that they may have stumbled upon them without even realizing it. Mikhail Piotrovich proposed the idea that certain black holes could, in fact, be openings to wormholes.

Black holes and wormholes have more in common than you might imagine. They’re both extraordinarily dense, and both have immense gravitational pulls. The major difference is that nothing can exit a black hole after entering, whereas any object going into a wormhole could, in theory, travel back out. Piotrovich and his team hope that studying gamma-ray emissions could help confirm their fascinating theory.^[5]

5 Black Holes Merge Causes Light of a Trillion Stars

Black holes are known for lurking in the inky blackness of space, crashing into each other and merging. However, until recently, scientists assumed that this process was invisible, playing out under the shroud of darkness.

But now, researchers believe that when black holes collide, a blinding surge of light is released a trillion times brighter than the sun. Ligo, the gravitational wave observatory, detected a dazzling flare back in 2019, which scientists think was caused by two black holes merging in the presence of a third black hole. The surrounding gas and dust act like floodlights for the collision, lighting up the cataclysmic event.

“This supermassive black hole was burbling along for years before this more abrupt flare,” explained Matthew Graham, the lead author of the study. “We conclude that the flare is likely the result of a black hole merger.”^[6]

4 Scientists Photograph Jet of Radio Waves

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an incredible feat of engineering. It consists of eight radio observatories dotted around the world. Collating their data creates one giant, high-precision telescope the size of the Earth.

In July 2021, the EHT project released a series of images of a black hole blasting out jets of radio waves. The black hole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy is known for emitting large amounts of energy, much more than the one in the Milky Way. But this marks the first time scientists have captured a black hole with such clarity as it spurts material into the skies. The EHT allows scientists to photograph the gigantic jets with ten times higher accuracy and sixteen times better resolution than was possible before.^[7]

3 Researchers Detect a Black Hole Gobbling up a Neutron Star

Black holes and neutron stars are among the densest, most exotic objects in the universe. When they crash into each other, all hell breaks loose. A collision is a cataclysmic event. The two behemoths merge with such intensity that it creates large waves that echo across space and time.

Over the last few years, scientists have seen two black holes colliding and two neutron stars colliding. But until recently, capturing a black hole crashing into a neutron star was a much more difficult challenge.

Then after much waiting, like buses, two came along at once. In January 2020, astronomers received signals from two black hole-neutron star mergers within ten days of each other. Scientists believe that both events took place around a billion years ago. Because space is so vast, the cosmic echoes only made it to Earth last year. In both cases, the black hole was so huge that it devoured the neutron star.^[8]

2 Astronomers Puzzled by Black Hole with “Impossible” Mass

In 2020, scientists were left scratching their heads after detecting a black hole collision that, according to theory, should have been impossible. At least one of the goliaths had a mass 85 times that of the sun, which scientists used to believe was too large to be involved in that kind of collision.

After the two crashed into each other and fused, they produced a black hole almost 150 times heavier than the sun. That is heavier than any black hole previously detected.

The distant merger is thought to have taken place when the universe was only half of its current age. Theoretical astrophysicist Ilya Mandel described the discovery as “wonderfully unexpected.”^[9]

1 Are Black Holes a Source of Near-Infinite Energy?

British physicist Sir Roger Penrose is a pivotal figure in astronomy. In 1969, he put forward the idea that black holes could be used by future civilizations to generate energy. In theory, an object placed close to but not inside a black hole should acquire negative energy. Penrose suggested that the object should then split in half, with one half being sucked in by the black hole and the other half recoiling away. The half that recoiled should now have gained energy from the black hole. This energy, if harnessed, could be used to power an entire planet.

As things stand, such a feat is well beyond the limits of current technology. But was Penrose correct? In 1971, physicist Yakov Zel’dovich devised an experiment that could take place here on Earth to test Penrose’s far-flung theory. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints, Zel’dovich’s experiment was also impossible.

Fast forward to June 2020 when, over half a century since Penrose first dreamt up the idea, researchers at the University of Glasgow were finally able to demonstrate his theory. The team built a ring of speakers to recreate the rotational effects of a black hole. They then listened as beams of sound waves became twisted and warped just like the object would have been in Penrose’s original theory.

“We’re thrilled to have been able to experimentally verify some extremely odd physics a half-century after the theory was first proposed.” Professor Daniele Faccio told reporters. “It’s strange to think that we’ve been able to confirm a half-century-old theory with cosmic origins here in our lab in the west of Scotland, but we think it will open up a lot of new avenues of scientific exploration.“^[10]

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!

Posthumous monolith of science fiction Philip K. Dick said that he wrote in that genre because there was “more latitude for the expression of truer ideas.” The focus on exploring ideas that serves as much of the appeal of science fiction means that, often, writers can get themselves into trouble. They can litter their stories with all sorts of logical lapses by focusing more on a metaphor than logical consistency, either in terms of the characters or the aspects of the technology.

Not that this is unique to science fiction at all, but when a storyteller is making up whole new technologies and worlds, there’s a lot more latitude to screw up in ways more literary fiction doesn’t usually have to worry about. Furthermore, none of these plot holes are in anyway ruinous for their stories. It’s just, well… it’s sometimes surprising what writers can get away with while the audience is distracted by the lasers and other wonders of the future.    

As always, be ready for spoilers!

10. Avatar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDh1knYpnmc

Avatar isn’t just the most successful science fiction story but the highest grossing film of all-time (worldwide–The Force Awakens bumped it from the top spot domestically), to the surprise of many. In 2009 it was as much the novelty of the gorgeously rendered environments as the story that drove it to gross $2.7 billion. The story, about how disabled soldier Jake Sully’s consciousness is connected to a bioengineered alien body to serve as ambassador for humanity to the Na’vi on Planet Pandora, seemed practically like an afterthought. Nowhere is this more obvious that in writer-director James Cameron’s blatantly slipshod plotting.

During the end of the second act of the movie, the Earth military destroys the main Na’vi habitat, the Home Tree. Pilot Trudy, played by Michelle Rodriguez, decides she doesn’t want to take part. So in dereliction of duty she conspicuously flies away from the bombing. And yet, she not only isn’t promptly arrested for disobeying a direct order in an environment where bombing a native population is the order of the day, but she’s able help Jake Sully and company escape from the brig with relatively little trouble. Seems as though few characters would be in a worse position to launch a rescue than conspicuous insubordinates.      

Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty how interested audiences will be in Cameron’s upcoming sequels to his megahit. Hopefully, he’s had enough time to remove holes like these from his follow up scripts.

9. Blade Runner 2049

Although it failed at the box office during its 2017 theatrical run, the fact it was the 17th bestselling title on home video in 2018 indicated Blade Runner 2049 is gradually developing its own following. Serving as one of the most belated sequels in film history, it both attempted to have firm, direct connections to the 1982 original and go its own way. These dueling interests unsurprisingly got in each other’s way a bit.

The biggest hole in the plot concerns the villainous business mogul, Wallace, and his relationship with the bioengineered clones called Replicants. In 2049, it’s explicitly stated that they’ve been designed to all be infertile as well as being outlawed in the wake of a devastating terrorist attack that destroyed all digitally stored records around the world. Wallace is of the belief that bringing back replicants is the future of humanity’s spread through the stars, and to that end is both engineering some of his own and on the hunt for a replicant that supposedly reproduced in defiance of her genetic programming.

But as DenofGeek.com pointed out, Wallace himself says the inability of replicants to reproduce was one of the things that allowed people to reassure themselves that replicants were subhuman. He also explicitly says that humanity “lost its taste for slavery.” So if he holds those beliefs in his head, keeping replicants with the ability to reproduce around, as well as the humans that bred with them–and their offspring–is the exact opposite of what he would want: destroying anything that could point to the existence of a fertile replicant if he hopes to sell people on accepting replicant slaves again. It’s the sort of inconsistency that’s particularly frustrating in a movie starring an ostensibly grounded villain.  

8. Star Trek (2009)

JJ Abrams’s reboot of the Star Trek films was a smash hit, although the series it launched seems to have stalled in 2016. Shamelessly emotional nearly to the point of being operatic, it was kinetic and action-packed enough that audiences didn’t have time to question the mechanics of the plot. However, the villain Nero’s story made so little sense that it required more effort not to think about it in the theater seats.

The primary setting for the movie is during the time when James T. Kirk ascends to be captain of the starship Enterprise. In the future, it turns out that the planet Romulus is going to be destroyed by a supernova. Also in the future Spock, another crew member of the Enterprise and essentially Kirk’s right-hand man, tries to stop the supernova and fails. A Romulan from that same future named Nero acquires both a ship and time-traveling ability and goes back in time to get revenge. This includes destroying Vulcan (Spock’s home planet) and Earth.

What never, ever, for any reason gets addressed in this plot is why Nero doesn’t use the fact he traveled back in time to save Romulus himself if that’s his motivation. With time travel technology he could make numerous attempts to save his planet and offset Spock’s eventual failure. But no, vengeance for something which hasn’t happened and which is no doubt on some level preventable is only viewed as a reason for him to be a one dimensional villain–which unfortunately, at the end of the day, he is. This goes to show that time travel should be avoided unless absolutely necessary if a movie’s story is going to hold up to repeat viewings.

7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

If you’ve been on YouTube for the past year, you probably had some video recommended to you insisting the storytelling of this hit didn’t match real world logic very well. There were even seemingly erroneous reports that Russian troll farms were used to spread negative sentiments about it online. Whatever your feelings about that, there’s a particular point that many have used as the centerpiece of their arguments. For the dedicated nitpicker, there’s very little arguing with it.

At the end of the second act, our heroes are escaping their main vessel, unaware that the villains in pursuit of them have their escape shuttles dead in their sights instead of being distracted by the decoy vessel. Admiral Holdo, in a suicidal last ditch effort, turns the decoy vessel around and sets the ship to travel at hyperdrive (previous movies in the Star Wars series had portrayed how carefully ships would pre-program a route to avoid colliding with all sorts of space hazards) and rammed the villains’ flagship with devastating results.

This begs a pretty obvious question: Why in eight Star Wars films was Holdo the first person to do this? If it allows such an outsized ship to take out its pursuer, why haven’t pilots in suicidal straits rammed the ships of the heros and villains time and again? We’ve been shown numerous pilots willing to give up their lives for the cause (the movie begins with a scene featuring a pilot doing just that). It seems as though screenwriter Rian Johnson thought he’d found a hole in the canon that he could cleverly exploit, but what many will do is insist he found a weakness in the design of the intellectual property that he should never have called attention to.

6. Star Wars: A New Hope/Return of the Jedi

Before a tag team of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron one-upped this film time and again, this 1977 smash hit was the most successful in world history. It made plot mechanics such as the mystical Force and the twist that its villain Darth Vader is the father of protagonist Luke Skywalker into household reference points.

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader takes Princess Leia captive and interrogates her at length over the hiding place of the main rebel stronghold. Later, long after Leia and Luke have learned that they’re siblings, Darth Vader uses the force to learn that his son Luke has a sister so that he can antagonize Luke by threatening to capture and convert her. Which opens up a gigantic inconsistency for the first film regarding why Vader wasn’t able to use the Force to discover Leia was his daughter; or, if he was too concerned about the rebel base to care about that, why he didn’t use the Force to learn where the base was. By Return of the Jedi Luke is quite attuned to the Force but Leia has no such stated defenses in the first film. The only explanation for this is depressingly simple: The Force was largely an afterthought for George Lucas while writing the film, and he had no consistency in what it could do while concocting it by the seat of his pants.

We’re not going to get on any high horse about what people devote YouTube channels to. But anyone who acts as if plot/logic lapses in Disney’s new Star Wars films are some kind of ruinous new occurrence is in for a nasty shock: Plot holes have been prominent features of the series from its conception.  

5. The Thing

A critical punching bag and box office bomb when it was initially released, this adaptation of John W. Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? is now one of the most beloved horror-science fiction works in cinema history. Its story of a team of American Antarctic researchers stuck in Outpost #31, who have to deal with an organism that can infect and turn any member of the team into a deadly monster, is as scary now as it was unpleasant at the time of its release. It’s helped immeasurably by how tightly and believably constructed it is for a movie about dealing with an alien, except for one big cheat.

The problem with this otherwise tight as a drum story is the need to have a device of some kind that can handily convince the survey team that they’ve conclusively beaten the the alien. So, Carpenter wrote that the Antarctic team has flamethrowers. As critic Scott Ashlin asked, why would a research team have flamethrowers? If there’s some piece of equipment that needs to be thawed in the extreme cold, setting it on fire is about the worst approach, and the fires a flamethrower shoots are much too difficult to control in a survival situation. Fortunately, the scene where the flamethrowers are introduced is so harrowing that the audience probably won’t be stopping to ask many questions.    

4. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Avatar showed that James Cameron was able to hit pay dirt despite his films having plot holes, but back in 1984 he practically required it of his work with his groundbreaking variation on the trendy slasher film model. A film wherein an artificial intelligence network sends an android assassin back in time to prevent the existence of a resistance leader while another soldier from the future tries to stop him? That’s such a complicated setup that it all but demands paradoxes and inconsistencies to be woven into the fabric of the film, but this has a pretty clear hole in the basic setup.

In the first film, the reason the T-800, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, has organic skin on him is basic: the time machine doesn’t send inorganic, robotic matter through without a layer of organic material to effectively trick the machine. But in the 1991 sequel, the artificial intelligence network sends through a “liquid metal” robot called T-1000, which is stronger than the T-800 unit and has the ability to shapeshift. So how can this robot have the vitally important organic layer if it’s entirely liquid metal? It’s a good thing no one actually mentions that rule in the second film, or audiences probably would have been asking that from the premiere on.

3. “Time Enough at Last”

Stepping away from movies for a moment, let’s talk about one of the most influential pieces of science fiction ever created: The Twilight Zone. In particular, one of the two most famous and beloved episodes of the original run, tied only with To Serve Man with it’s “It’s a cookbook!” reveal. This 1959 episode follows compulsive reader Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) through his frustrating life, through the destruction of his known world and the rest of humanity, to the potential sanctum of a library, and then through a hydrogen bomb, and into the private hell of his glasses shattering just as he’s collected all the books he wants with all the time in the world to read them.