You’re a writer – you know when you’ve goofed up something in your story – wait, how DID that guy know what time it was? Of course you scramble back to work to somehow give that guy a watch or a view of the clocktower or something, right?
Even the greats sometimes miss it. In the 1946 detective movie The Big Sleep a guy named Owen Taylor gets murdered, shot up by a machine gun, right in front of detective Philip Marlowe’s eyes. This was a big film, directed by Howard Hawks and featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Hollywood’s hottest couple of the day. It was a first rate adaptation of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel.
But who was behind the machine gun? Who shot Owen Taylor? The guys who adapted Chandler’s novel never explained it. Eventually, Raymond Chandler himself came out and said that he had no idea who killed that guy. And he wrote the book!
This weekend I was half-heartedly watching a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on YouTube while half-heartedly putting up Christmas decorations.
If Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is new to you, it was a TV show that ran on ABC from 1964 to 1968, featuring a nuclear research submarine called Seaview in the far-away future of the 1970’s.
Where Star Trek, running on NBC during the same period, presented its viewers with intriguing characters and often deep philosophical questions, Voyage episodes centered around monsters and ghosts and mad scientists intent on sending the Seaview to the Bottom of the Sea.
The episode I saw, called The Fossil Men, was preceded by an episode called The Heat Monster and followed by The Mermaid. Gives you an idea of the plot lines.
Anyway, it’s kind of cruel to point out plot holes in a show devoted to costumes and special effects, but this one caught me.
The sub’s sonar has picked up a strange clicking noise from the sea bottom, as if rocks are getting pounded together. Admiral Nelson, the resident scientist, just happened to be reading ancient sea lore about this very spot of the vast ocean (no mention of which). According to his book, sailors 200 years ago reported hearing the exact same thing just before their fleet of ships was sucked into a huge maelstrom and never heard from again.
Duh-duh-DUH just then the sea bubbles and foams and the Seaview is herself caught in a huge maelstrom. OMG, will they ever survive? Or will they be back next week to face The Mermaid?
I paused in my half-hearted attempt to untangle Christmas lights and thought, wait a minute. The old-timey crewmen reported hearing weird noises just before their ships were sunk. So, to whom did they make these reports? This was 1967, so the ships went down in 1767, roundaboutsy, so radio wasn’t a thing. A maelstrom’s a pretty big deal, drowning-of-sailors-wise.
It didn’t matter to the plot of the show, of course. From what I could tell, the ancient sailors were now fossilized and wanted to sink the Seaview. Something like that.
I turned it off because my wife came home and I didn’t want her to catch me watching such drivel.
Closing plot holes like that can sometimes get sealed up in a sentence – only one ship survived to tell the tale. That’s if you’re lucky.
If it’s a big gaping hole, it might take a chapter, even a whole rewrite to get that character around to where the story makes sense.
Admiral Nelson has bigger fish to fry than that plot hole – maybe the answer was on the next page of that sea lore he was reading.
But it did give me pause to think about my own work. Plot holes. Hmmm.
Where are those questions in my own work that I’m afraid to ask because I know there’s no answer because I didn’t think of it until just now?
Uh oh.
How does he know what time it is?
Uh oh.
John D Reinhart 