History Headscratchers / IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull

** Even if they are canon, he might not have the means to contact them, and there's no guarantee Spalko would listen.

** But lead are commonly used for radiation shielding, which is better than other material such as wood.

* It is nearly impossible that he wouldn't have gotten broken bones from the landing, and horrible burns from watching the mushroom cloud, but the movie does take place over a fairly short period of time. He may have ended up with cancer, who knows.

** Indy drank from the Holy Grail, giving him superhuman endurance, ''obviously''.
*** His father drank from the Grail too, yet that doesn't seem to have prevented Henry Sr. from passing away between films. The implication is that, whatever effect the Grail had on either man, it was temporary.
*** Or it could be one drink from the Grail gives you one extra "life." Jones Sr. used his to survive the shot from Donovan, Indy used his here. Presumably he'll just live a normal life from now on. Or as normal a life as Indiana Jones can get.
*** The "extra life" explanation seems to work best. Honestly I was bothered far more by Henry Sr. dying of old age when the Grail seemingly should've extended his lifespan than by the whole fridge thing.
*** Except which is more likely: that Indiana Jones can survive being flung a considerable distance inside a refrigerator ''without'' the need for an "extra life", or that Indiana Jones could have made it through ''all of World War II'' without using up a bonus life he'd acquired shortly before his military service?
*** Millions of soldiers made it through all of World War II without having drunk from the Holy Grail beforehand.
*** As for the Grail immortality, the knight said "the Grail cannot pass beyond the Great Seal, for that is the boundry, and the price, of immortality." That suggests that the immortality only works within the temple with its effects ceasing upon crossing the Great Seal, which was the entrance. It was the whole reason why the Grail Knight couldn't leave. When Elsa crossed the Seal with the Grail, the whole place fell apart. Indy and Henry had to cross the Seal in order to escape, so they lost their immortality, hence why Henry later died of old age. It was previously established that the Knight's two brothers died of old age after leaving the temple, meaning that they lost their immortality as well.

** Think of it this way: the FBI is effectively ruining the career of a legitimate American hero over a very weak suspicion, while completely missing the obvious KGB agents rampaging through the United States. It can be seen as an indictment of the paranoia of McCarthyism (which did ruin innocent peoples lives) blinding the authorities to a legitimate threat: they've become so focused on looking for traitors in the ranks, they're completely missing the actual DirtyCommies!

* Due to how Indy gets in trouble with the Soviet Union, why doesn't he, at any point, try to contact Dr. Gennadi Volodnikov, his Soviet enemy-turned-pal from ''VideoGame/IndianaJonesAndTheInfernalMachine'', so he can convince the Soviet Union to tell Spalko and her men to back off? They parted on good terms when they met ten years ago...

*** As for the Grail immortality, the knight said "the Grail cannot pass beyond the Great Seal, for that is the boundry, and the price, of immortality." That suggests that the immortality only works within the temple with its effects ceasing upon crossing the Great Seal, which was the entrance. It was the whole reason why the Grail Knight couldn't leave. When Elsa crossed the Seal with the Grail, the whole place fell apart. Indy and Henry had to cross the Seal in order to escape, so they lost their immortality, hence why Henry later died of old age.

* During the Hangar 51 scenes, are there no other personnel stationed there besides the 5 MPs at the gate? You'd think the storage site for arcane artifacts would have more than a skeleton crew stationed there.

--->'''Indy''': Crystals aren't magnetic. ((Pries a coin off the skull)

* How come people are always quick to decry the Fridge Nuking scene, when in fact the scene before it made even less sense, where Indy escapes the Russians with the rocket powered prototype... jet... thing. What was the point of that device?! I have a theory that people were so weirded out by that scene that they don't even remember it and subconsciously blame the fridge nuke instead.
** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled Rocket sled]]. ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin.
** NostalgiaFilter - it's not like the series ''hasn't'' done at least one ultra-ridiculous scene. (Indy sliding on the ground behind a truck, the whole "Raft as a parachute"...)

* The most obvious and irritating one from Crystal Skull. If the aliens cared about knowledge, and spent millennia collecting so many artifacts, why did they ''fucking destroy everything'' when they left?

* So...there's a recurring theme in Stephen Spielberg's films: there are no good fathers. They're either unreliable, distant, or completely absent. And now, Indiana Jones, one of the most enduring heroic creations in cinema, has ''become'' one of those fathers? Not deliberately, perhaps, but still...it happened. A little discouraging.
** Not really. He jumped right into trying to be a father to Mutt the instant he found out.
** The main reason Indy was a "bad father" was he simply didn't ''know'' he was one - the instant he found out that Mutt was actually his own son, he flip-flopped and said "You are finishing school!"

* Let's forget the fridge for a moment, this Troper felt the monkeys were even ''more'' ridiculous. How does Mutt go from being stuck in a tree to having an army of monkeys following him ''just'' to attack the Russians after {{Vine Swing}}ing his way across the jungle?
** Monkey see, monkey do.
** It's an in-joke. Marion once referred to the monkey from ''Raiders'' as "our baby", and the ones Mutt (their ''real'' child) encounters are the same species.
** That's often been cited as the second most ridiculous moment from this film

* I can't stand the scene with Indy in the quicksand using a snake as a rope. He freaks out, and can't even bare to have it referred to as a snake. Did they forget that in Raiders he willingly went into a chamber full of venomous snakes without a single complaint? Even at the start of Raiders, in the airplane with his friend's pet snake, he handles it fine. We get no indication that he threw the snake out or anything. In fact, he never says he has a fear of snakes, just that he hates them. That little piece of exposition was only included to make the later Well Of Souls scene (the aforementioned snake pit) more intense for the audience. Cut the twenty second snake bit in the plane, and the rest of Raiders still plays fine, Indy's character is no different. Yet, here we are in Crystal Skull, with his life depending on grabbing the calmest, non-venomous snake, and he's almost crying. I know we saw his traumatic experience falling into a snake vat in Last Crusade, but as I said earlier, he seemed pretty fine by the time of Raiders. Did his phobia get better over time, then worse? I feel like the writers never sat down to give a close look at the preceding films, relying instead on their vague memories.

* Instead of his long-lost son, Mutt, wouldn't have made more sense if Indiana Jones was accompanied by an older Shortround? They spent alot more time together, and had a fairly close emotional connection (Indiana saving him from the cultists, him saving Indiana from Mola Ram's brainwashing). Even before meeting Indiana, Shortround had come from a childhood surviving the Japanese bombing of Shanghai and living as a under-aged taxi driver. Mutt, on the other hand, had never been shown engaging in a high stress situation before, yet he manages to swing through a jungle with a bunch of monkeys and evade a pursuing group of angry commies. This "suddenly had a full-grown son in-between movies" thing seems to be getting very overused.
** Short Round was still TheScrappy for many, so they might not have wanted to see an older version of the character come back. It was really only after this film had some time to gel in public consciousness that people went back to ''Temple of Doom'' and found it did have some redeeming qualities.

* Being in eastern Germany, Leipzig was in the Soviet occupation zone and subsequently in East Germany. Even if he was owed a favor, would it really be such a good idea to take a teaching position in a city located in what was basically a Soviet satellite state?

** Moreover, [[UsefulNotes/FulgencioBatista]] still had one year left in power since the movie takes place in 1957.

*** It's at least implied that the skull [[spoiler: is sentient, even when detached from a body.]] So it could be that [[spoiler: it's ''choosing'' when to direct the attractive force at things.]]
** It's probably not magnetism that's doing these things at all, but some sort of telekinetic energy that 1950s humans simply ''call'' "magnetism" because the items they've seen it affect just happen to have been metallic. If anything, it seems to be selectively affecting ''weapons'' -- gunpowder, ammunition, guns, metal clubs, knives -- and gold, which [[spoiler: the skull has "seen" humans fighting over]], so maybe it's a mechanism designed to disarm and pacify people who come near the skull. The fact it ''repels'' [[spoiler: man-eating ants]] would seem to support the idea that it's a protective force.

* [[spoiler:Why did the FBI just kinda stop chasing Indy around after the plainclothes Commies showed up?]]
** [[spoiler:Quite possibly they might have been afraid of direct conflict escalating into a full-fledged war.]]

** [[spoiler:He left the country shortly after and started travelling across South America. That's way outside of the FBI's jurisdiction.]]
** [[spoiler: Or they quit following Indy to follow, y'know, the ''actual'' DirtyCommies.]]

* [[spoiler:If the Aliens were archaeologists collecting artifacts of this planet's civilization, why did they leave everything behind / destroy everything when they went home?]]
** [[spoiler:The aliens seemed to have two goals: inform the locals and collect data. Considering they're some hive mind creature, they probably didn't need to keep the artifacts after they had been studied. Plus, one of them was missing its head for 2,000 years. At that point I'd just want to get the hell out of there and go home.]]
*** [[spoiler:Those weren't artifacts, they got them when they were new. I figure they were housewarming gifts they put in the metaphorical attic. I mean, you give people stuff they want to pay you back, but you got anything they could give anyway. "Oh, a... statue. That's... Nice. We'll put it in our... treasure... room. That's it. Treasure Room.]]
*** [[spoiler: That one alien lost its skull for only 500 years, there were Conquistador corpses in the pit leading to the treasure room so the explorer must have stolen the skull rather than "found it". Still, it doesn't answer why they chose to stay here after dying rather than return after successfully completing their mission... unless they didn't want their followers home to be flash flooded, but they were god-kings, they could have just told them to set up elsewhere.]]

* This may be cause for some MST3KMantra, but how did Indy [[spoiler:survive a nuclear blast in a lead-lined refrigerator?]]
** [[spoiler:Hardware was heavy and done with several metal layers in the 50's. And lead prevents radiation poisoning.]]

** [[spoiler: What concerns me more isn't the fact that the lead would block the radiation, but more of the fact that the explosion vaporized an entire town, including a car, yet not only was the refrigerator perfectly unharmed, Indy survived being thrown hundreds of feet, entirely unharmed. Though, RuleOfCool.]]
*** This is exactly why many feel this scene destroyed the franchise.
** [[spoiler:Also take into account that in those days, most homes were even more pre-fabricated than they are now, especially in the Midwest. Also it was in a testing ground, so they would not have EVERYTHING to scale - most of the cars were probably "tin foil shells", the houses didn't have fully-functioning. They put the [=TVs=] and radios in and working as a probable test on what effects the blast had on working electronic systems... ]]
*** [[spoiler:But what about the radiation after the fact? Also, the fact that lead lined or not, he should have fried from the heat alone? Obviously, there isn't an explanation, but somethings just went so far, even for Indiana Jones, that it was almost verging on parody, I thought.]]
*** [[spoiler:The bomb was sitting on a tower a few miles away. The damaging effects from a nuclear blast are fourfold: blast wave, thermal radiation, ionizing radiation, and residual radiation. As the blast wave is roughly hemispherical, it gets rapidly weaker the further away it travels; the town was just far enough away. It wrecked the town, but the fridge was sturdy enough to take it. Thermal radiation comes from the flash and gets weaker as the fireball dissipates; Indy was inside a fridge, inside a house, and it wasn't close enough to vaporize anything in the town, which it would have had the bomb been much closer and/or directly overhead. It only burned and melted objects exposed to the direct blast. Ionizing radiation, also mostly instant, was blocked via the lead-lined fridge. And finally, residual radiation was the reason for his scrubdown chemical shower a short while later. The most farfetched part of that scene actually is him not rolling out of the fridge severely bruised from the tumble.]]
*** [[spoiler:Severely bruised? The fridge was thrown hundreds of feet. He would have broken most of his bones if he survived at all.]]

** [[spoiler:I think it's a matter of ElementalRockPaperScissors: a nuclear bomb is clearly a "Radiation" type effect, which is weak against "Lead."]]
** [[spoiler: A literal case of FridgeLogic]].
*** [[spoiler: Or, indeed, FridgeBrilliance]].
*** [[spoiler:''Or'', nevertheless, FridgeHorror]].
** [[spoiler:I think everybody is overlooking the fact that this was a 1950's era refrigerator. That means the door actually latched closed when shut as opposed to the magnetic seal used in today's refers. The reason manufacturers switched over to magnetic door seals was because throughout the 50's and 60's, little kids were dying in droves when they would crawl into an abandoned refer (say ... to hide in a game of Hide and Seek) and would suffocate because there IS NO WAY TO OPEN THE DOOR FROM THE INSIDE. As a adult male, Indy wouldn't have enough room inside to be able kick the door open.]]

*** Indy's done other odd stuff: I mean, the truck scene in ''Raiders''. It's a good thing that Indy's clothes are indestructible - who else could survive being dragged behind a truck going around 35+ mph [[spoiler: with only one or two layers of clothing separating his genitals from being dragged along the ground]], have absolutely ''no'' friction burns or infection to show for it, and ''no'' clothing damage? This troper was in the ER once and they rushed in someone who slipped off of a truck, grabbed on to something, and was dragged along a dirt road for a good sixty feet. Let me tell you this: It was ''not'' pretty. He got a friction burn from ''hell'', got infected, and the only reason it wasn't worse was that it was only his legs - if he did it like Indy, that guy would [[spoiler: be dead of infection and would have been unable to conceive Mutt unless Marion was pregnant before Indy friction burned his balls into oblivion on a dirt road - which would mean that Mutt has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.]]

** [[spoiler: This troper can remember an incident that may well have been the inspiration for it:- The destruction of Almeida. All the ammunition in the town's garrison goes up at once, shockwave levels most of the town. One soldier survives by diving into a baker's oven. Probably more sensible than a refrigerator - they were huge brick monstrosities built to be mostly heatproof. It wouldn't have protected the soldier from radiation, for which reason he was most likely very grateful this was back in Napoleonic times. I suppose the incident just got... exaggerated somewhat.]]
*** [[spoiler: If Indy was supposed to have died, then lemme introduce you to a lot of people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including one person who survived ''both''. I mean heck...people survived a volcanic eruption by ''diving under a bench''.]]

* [[spoiler:If the box is highly magnetic, and can make gunpowder fly, how come everything else in the warehouse that's metallic isn't all stuck to it?]]
** It's blocked by the special [[spoiler: anti-magnetic wood the crates are made of]].
** Also, [[spoiler:gunpowder is, well, ''powder''. It's really light. Everything else metal in the room was much heavier, and thus wouldn't be pulled as easily.]]

** It's at least implied that [[spoiler: the skull is sentient, even when detached from its body]]. So it's possible that [[spoiler: the skull ''chose'' to direct magnetic forces at some things and not others]].

*** It's not "a few miles away", it's maybe a few hundred miles to half a mile at the most. Even with a low yield bomb, there's no way it could withstand the blast.

* This may be cause for some MST3Kmantra, but how did Indy [[spoiler:survive a nuclear blast in a lead-lined refrigerator?]]

* Let's forget the fridge for a moment, this Troper felt the monkeys were even ''more'' ridiculous. How does Mutt go from being stuck in a tree to having an army of monkeys following him ''just'' to attack the Russians after {{Tarzan}}ing his way across the jungle?