Fridge / The Fly (1986)

Fridge Logic in The Fly (1986).

Fridge Brilliance

• "Brundle" is an anagram for Blunder.
• Aside from taking coffee with his sugar, an early hint at what's going on with Seth's body is when Tawny tries to put rubbing alcohol on Seth's previously sustained back wound and he automatically has a knee-jerk reaction to it. Rubbing alcohol is *lethal* to flies. Now if only Stathis or Veronica had a spray bottle with that stuff on them in the finale...
• Seth's newfound strength seems like it comes straight out of a comic book, but real life science has suggested that insects could *easily* tear humans apart if they were the same size.
• It's often pointed out that Seth ends up with two great, obsessive passions in his life — his work with the telepods, which ends up "evolving" into his transformation into Brundlefly (which he becomes genuinely fascinated by), and his relationship with Veronica. In the climax, he tries to bring everything together by using the pods to merge his body with hers and their unborn child's. Instead, Stathis rescues her and Seth ends up merged with one of the pods. Seth doesn't get his human bride, but he is fused with his work — becoming Married to the Job after a fashion.
• Why Brundlefly’s eyes don’t look those of a fly is because no matter how much he thinks he’s losing his human mind and reason, his human compassion will always be there no matter what he or the others think otherwise. When he gets merged with parts of the Telepod, he begs Veronica to help him end his life but when she said she can’t do it for him, he decides to help her do it by clearly showing her those eyes. While she finally does it, these actions show that, no matter how much of his humanity Brundle may have lost due to his fly nature or to desperation, he will always have compassion and kindness, the two most important things that humans have throughout the eons.

Fridge Horror

• Veronica isn't the only woman that Brundle had sex with after the teleporter accident and before he realized what had gone wrong. It's fully possible that Tawny could have been carrying a mutant child as well, and without the knowledge of Brundle's mutation that Veronica had.
  • Going by the sequel, Seth and Ronnie's son is the only offspring the creature sired. Meaning Tawny was lucky enough that her body was on a safe day or she had the fetus aborted after discovering her pregnancy (which is believable enough since she would have had no deep attachments to Seth to make her consider keeping the child).
    • Not to mention that Tawny seems to have been actively looking for casual sex that night, so is very likely to be on birth control...
    • Tawny only wanting that makes it even more assured she'd get an abortion if Seth got her pregnant. All that was shown of Tawny's personality pointed to her being just a woman on the prowl for men. She has no signs of a husband or even a boyfriend before meeting Seth. Her being so quick to bail once Veronica catches them together (which might've been helped by how Seth was acting obviously threatening towards her by trying to get her in the machine) points to her not being attached to him, at least not enough to fight Ronnie over him (and to Tawny's credit, might hint at her being an Ethical Slut who draws the line at being "the other woman"). Seth knocking her up would give all the complications which automatically come from a woman carrying and giving birth even if the baby wasn't an abomination. Since he wasn't her husband Tawny's possible baby would be a bastard (and back when the movie aired illegitimacy was indeed something shameful to brand a child with) and we have no idea what her financial situation is (and having a kid is always expensive just from feeding it alone) or occupation is or home is. No no, abortion's the only option that wouldn't ruin Tawny's life.
• Imagine if something else got into the machine. Flies are bad enough; what if it had been a cockroach, which are not only hideous, but nigh indestructible?
  • "As Seth Brundle awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect..."
• Seeing as Seth merged with the (inanimate) parts from the telepod, and considering the deformed mess that came out of fusing a cat and a baboon...exactly WHAT kind of grotesque abomination could have resulted from Seth fusing not only with Ronnie but also her fetus AND all of Ronnie's clothing?!?!
  • Moreso, while Seth was way beyond insane and animalistic at that point, Ronnie was fully conscious...imagine being in the telepod one moment, and being part of whatever the heck that thing would have been next!
  • It’s possible that the end product wouldn’t have been too bad. In early attempts the telepod was only programmed to transport, however by the end it could have been programmed to intelligently merge and filter, combining what it considers the best elements and disregarding the rest. Mentally on the other hand, wow that person would be a train wreck, even just trying to sift through all of their memories!
  • If the sequel was any indication, Seth would have come out cured of his plight, but Ronnie would have been reduced to a disgusting pile of flesh and bone in the vague shape of a human.
    • That doesn't apply; Martin wrote a program intended to extract the flawed genes from his body and essentially swap them with someone else, dumping his flawed genes into Bartok while leaving himself a normal human being, whereas Seth was explicitly trying to merge himself with Ronnie and the baby into a single life-form.