Headscratchers / Wonder Woman 1984

As a Headscratchers page, all spoilers will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Knowledge of the Stone

• How did Max Lord know about the wish stone? He’s a conman and tv personality, there’s no indication he has any education or connections to know about some incredibly obscure artifact.
  • The stone has connections to South American countries and Maxwell is a Latin immigrant, so he probably heard about it through folklore.
  • Also, it looks like he was obsessively looking for it (presumably to...literally...magic his way out of his financial trouble).

Asteria's Armor

• Where did Diana find Asteria's armor? It has such a powerful backstory, you'd think its acquisition would be a movie in and of itself, but instead she makes it sound like she bought it at an Amazon flea market for $10.
  • The details aren't important to this story. Suffice to say, Diana had decades of time during which, among other things, she would have been able to track down and recover the armor. For all we know, the armor could have been split into pieces that were scattered across the globe, and it took her years to find each piece and then rebuild the armor.
  • Her job is antiquities. As was said, she could easily track down and find pieces. She may have even been contacted as an authority on Greek artifacts. The story of her finding it may have been as simple as seeing a photo and stealing it from a museum. Given how capable she is in combat, she could have smashed her way in and left in less than five minutes. There's not even a villain to overcome.

Sorcery

• When Diana makes the stolen jet invisible, she talks about how it's a spell she's been recently practicing. Ignoring the fact that sorcery has never been Wonder Woman's forte, why is she just now learning this trick? Considering she's been operating in secret since the end of World War 1, you'd think she'd have mastered invisibility a long time ago.
  • Diana has never really embraced her godhood properly, probably because Ares was the one who introduced it to her, and she's been using it as little as possible to be close to humanity.
  • It's mentioned that the first and last time she tried using her invisibility powers, she never found the coffee cup that she tested them out on. That highlights the inherent problem with invisibility magic; it's not practical in the long run if you can't figure out how to make things visible again.

Barbara's Offscreen Teleportation

• How the heck did Barbara/Cheetah suddenly show up at the White House fight? We at least saw onscreen justification for Diana and Steve getting in. There’s no indication of how Barbra would know to be at the White House or how she got in.
  • Max Lord was heading there and the media would be all over that (his driver's 'wish' was that all the traffic would make way for his car...that was bound to make the news). Barbara figured that Diana would be heading there, so she followed to protect Max.

Why can't Diana love again?

• It seems strange how someone with immortality could spend their life unable to move on and find someone else to find new happiness with.
  • The movie clumsily tried to establish that everyone Diana associated herself with in the first movie grew old and died. Steve Trevor obviously made a big impact on her life and she couldn’t find that same spark in another person of romantic interest and this served as the main motivation for her wish to fulfill a life she felt was robbed from her.
  • Simplest explanation (though I could be wrong about this): Some people just don't forget their first love.
  • I was the under the impression that it wasn't Diana being unable to find love again so much as her not allowing herself to find love again, out of reverence for Steve or her guilt at failing to prevent his death. The movie also seems to go with a Most Men Are Perverts kind of thing, from Diana's point of view, if not on the whole; could be that, consciously or otherwise, she's too busy judging each man she meets against her glorified memories of Steve and how wholesome he was to consider whether any of them might actually be a good match.
  • Most people have picked up on how Batman v Superman and, more tangibly, both versions of Justice League show Ship Tease between Diana and Bruce Wayne. So while it did take her nearly a century to get over Steve and even begin to show signs of considering another man, perhaps her character arc in this sequel helped her get there, in the forty-one years between it and the next few movies.

Can't Catch A Cab

• After Diana has a lonely dinner, she attempts to hail a cab, but it stops for a male passenger instead. Why does the immortal Diana need a cab when it's established that she move at rapid speeds and across great distances with great ease, even when she's in a somewhat depowered state? They're trying to establish the sexist world she lives in, but this falls short due to her abilities.

  • That wasn't sexism. The man was in front of her on the curb so the cab picked the closest one.

  • Maybe she was full?
  • So, she fights crime on an empty stomach?
  • The opening establishes that she's (somewhat) trying to keep her Wonder Woman persona under the radar, by destroying security cameras in the mall and focusing on quick, small-scale interventions rather than big end-of-the-world events. Using her powers in public would go against that, and she couldn't change into her costume because she couldn't exactly wear it under her clothes like Superman.
  • She kicked a car out of the way of hitting a runner and she later goes back to her apartment to change into casual clothing without anyone noticing and possesses fast movement. If she can easily get around there, it shouldn’t be a problem again.

Impenetrable Egyptian Children

• Wonder Woman, in a somewhat depowered state, still manages to somehow save two Egyptian children who break her fall when she hits the pavement rolling. How did they manage to survive that tumble that likely would have at least injured one of them severely?

How does Barbara get empowered the second time by Max Lord?

• In the climax, Barbara teams up with Maxwell Lord after the White House incident, and he offers to make any wish of hers come true, and Barbara wishes to become 'the apex predator' so Max turns her into the Cheetah who could fight the fully-powered Diana on even grounds. Problem is, didn't Barbara already used her wish to become more like Diana when she wished upon the Dreamstone the first time around? The Dreamstone is explicitly stated to be able to grant someone only one wish, and there's nothing that indicates that Maxwell taking the power of it for himself cancelled it and those who have already wished once can wish again through him, so how is he able to grant Barbara's second wish to make her even more powerful? Doesn't make sense.
  • Evidently, Max acts as a second Dreamstone entirely. The first one granted one wish, but he can grant another because he's not the same stone.
  • Before Barbara wishes to become an "Apex Predator", she says to Max that she doesn't want to be like Diana anymore. This is effectively her renouncing her original wish, which allows Max to give her another one.
  • Considering she does this seemingly without touching him, it seems unlikely this is either an additional wish, or a renouncing and then a new wish. It seems like a logical explaination is that once you have a wish 'active', you not only can verbally renounce it, you can verbally change it. If a wish is supposed to be 'what you desire', it only makes sense...desires can change. It's just that no one else knows this is possible or tries it.
    • It's shown that contact with the Dreamstone isn't necessary to renounce a wish when Wonder Woman renounces her wish before Max gets to the satellite system, so Barbara could have renounced her wish without touching him and then gotten a new wish.
  • Or he just got someone else to make the wish for her, like he often does.
  • After Max takes over all the world's TV sets, he makes several wishes come true. Then he turns away from the camera, and takes several things back in exchange, including someone else's health to reverse the damage he had sustained from granting wishes earlier. If you listen to what he says, he also takes strength from one of the wishers and explicitly gives it to her, meaning Barbara. Up until then, Barbara was still human, despite saying she wants to be an apex predator on the helicopter. She only turns into Cheetah after that, and then goes to fight Diana to keep her away from Max. In short, he wasn't granting a second wish, he was redirecting to Barbara power that he took in exchange for someone's wish.

So no one remembers the day the world almost ended?

• The world almost fell to nuclear armageddon one day, and it's never reflected on by any members of the Justice League or the US government? Did Bruce Wayne have Diana's involvement in that situation in her file? Was that day a potential reason for the creation of the Suicide Squad?
  • It's probably why John Kent was so paranoid about letting Clark become public knowledge. He's witnessed firsthand how society reacts to the miraculous.
  • I think at least you can rule it out as being a reason for the creation of the Suicide Squad, because Waller has a file on Diana and she would have cited her as a possible metahuman terrorist (instead of a generic "the next Superman") if she thought she was capable of being one. It's possible that the reset button did indeed wipe many memories, maybe Diana can retain them because she's magical.
  • Given this is the 80s and the big offscreen conflict is between Russia and the US, it's probably just handwaved as the boiling point of the Cold War.

Cheetahs as apex predators

• Barbara turns into Cheetah after asking to become an ‘apex predator.’ Ironically, cheetahs are far from apex, getting kicked around by every other predator in their habitat.
  • Barbara wishing to become one could be interpreted after she nearly became the victim of a predator of a different kind herself, had Diana not save her.
  • This could actually play into the jerkass/malicious nature of the power of the Dreamstone. In the end, Barbara only got the appearance of what people assume is an apex predator while deep down the essence of the stone knew what she truly was.
  • An apex predator simply sits at the top of a food chain. So even though cheetahs would lose a fight with larger predators, no predators hunt them for food, so they are an apex predator.
  • More likely, it's Max's idea of what an "apex predator" is, not Barbara's. He has a Cheetah pelt on the sofa in his office (prominently seen when he is talking to his Alistair), so he likes them. Plus the fact that Barbara was wearing an outfit that was already reminiscent of a Cheetah. He probably thought "She clearly likes Cheetahs, and Cheetahs are badass predators. She wants to be a badass predator. I guess I'll make her into Cheetah".
  • Either that, or Barbara herself just thinks cheetahs are the epitome of apex predators. Earlier, she comments on Diana's high heels. Guess what pattern they have? Cheetah print. She's highly educated in many fields, but perhaps she doesn't know much about zoology.
  • Is she actually a cheetah, though? It may well be that the stone simply made her powerful in a feral way, and any resemblance to a cheetah was coincidental.
  • My handwave is that Max picked the worst apex predator he could think of on purpose, as a joke.
  • Barbara was wearing a cheetah-print skirt when she was empowered by Max, so presumably the skirt merged with her skin and turned her into some Monstruous Humanoid that just happens to look like a cheetah. Note that when all the wishes are undone, Barbara's clothes reappear once she reverts back to being human.

Wishing stone consistency

• Given how the stone creates nukes out of nothing, it's clear that Diana and Steve should've been put off by how it didn't do that for him, instead shunting him into the body of an existing man. As mentioned above, however, the two characters never even consider him.
  • IIRC Diana wasn't aware about the nukes just appearing out of nowhere until it made the news. At that point she's already wary of the devious nature of the Dreamstone and she was already investigating its origin, suggesting that she does indeed realizes to some extent that the wishes granted from the Dreamstone are bad, which is why she and Steve went out of their way to try and stop Max from causing any more damage. Granted, the film should've taken the time to consider the nasty implication behind Steve's 'resurrection' into the body of another man and not just simply gloss it over, but Diana and Steve have a comparatively more serious problem to deal with at that moment (the fate of the world), plus it's implied that Diana isn't thinking clearly in the latter half of the film: she just got her lover back but then realizes that it comes with a cost and there's a good chance that she has to lose him again, and Diana was in denial that she could find a way to hold on to Steve and save the world as well until Steve has to break it out to her that it's either him or the world and convince her to do the right thing.
• It's established that the Dreamstone takes away the person's "most valued possession" as the cost of their wish. Given that Diana wished for Steve to come back to life and only lost her powers and invulnerability for it, it means Diana values her powers more than her own compassion. The same inconsistency happens to Max. The movie tries to convey near the beginning that he wants to make his son proud, and in the end that his son is his greatest treasure, to justify his wish to become the Dreamstone so that he could have infinite success. Yet the Dreamstone takes away his personal health as the cost of being it, suggesting he values his vitality more than he values doing right by his son. Shouldn't the Dreamstone have a) taken away Diana's compassion for the world as the cost for wishing back Steve, and b) taken away Max's son, since it's not like it'd have a vested interest in teaching him a moral lesson about family or giving him the time to learn that lesson via lasso?
  • It could just be that Diana and Max don't consider their compassion or their son a 'possession' in the same sense as they consider her powers and his health as a possession; Diana's compassion is part of who she is while her powers are a tool she uses to help others (and it's possible that she was morally compromised to some degree given that she took so long to accept that Steve coming back like that was a bad thing), and Max doesn't 'own' his son but just doesn't realise that he doesn't need to be more than what he is to win his son's love.
  • The value is implied not to be determined by the individual, but by those who've encountered the individual. Wonder Woman presents herself as a superhero and she remarks that Barbara's very personable. So the Dreamstone siphoned off Wonder Woman's powers and Barbara's kindness. Maxwell Lord's deteriorating health could be tied to his public image as an unflappable businessman and later as a miracle-maker, so the Dreamstone started eating away at him to tarnish that image.

Dreamstone touching

• It was established that you have to be touching the stone to make the wish. How does Maxwell Lord grant wishes of all of the people he can't touch at the film's climax?
  • He convinced himself that the technology metaphorically touching everyone was the same as literally touching everyone. That probably wouldn't have worked, but he took the precaution to have a tech wish that the whole plan would work for him. Magic enabled more magic, simple as that.
  • He made the technician who greeted him wish that it would work as he wanted it to, and so it did.

Could Steve wish for himself?

• Just a curious question: with Steve being technically 'resurrected', could he make a wish for himself when Max broadcasts his powers to grant people's wishes around the world? Like, what if 'Steve' wishes to actually be alive as his own person and not just simply a soul existing inside someone else's body. Would it count as Steve's own wish or the Handsome Man's wish? What would be the possible cost for such a wish? Could he just wish for everything to return to normal (Max was clearly too Drunk with Power at the time of his worldwide wish-granting speech to care about every single wish: he just granted them all, so there's a good chance that Steve's own wish could actually be used to counter it)? Etc.
  • Max couldn't have been granting every wish, surely someone immediately said in response to Max showing up on their TV and asking for their wish with 'I wish you couldn't interupt my TV show, you snake-oil salesman!', and boom, entire plan undone.
    • And then that one person's television shows his desired program as his wish is fulfilled, but for everyone else they still see Max's broadcast normally.

Sudden ability to fly

• So, Diana gets her powers back and suddenly also learns to fly in mere seconds? But then later needs to lasso lightning to get through the air?
  • I got the impression that she had tried flying in the past and had been unsuccessful, hence her asking Steve about it. Steve's speech was just what gave her the final push to unlock it, like at the end of the first movie when she figured out how to control and redirect Ares's lightning. The lightning bolt lassoing just seemed like a way to propel herself forward faster.
  • A good question would be why did she seemingly forget how to fly by the time BvS and Justice League happens.
  • Just because she doesn't use the power in chronologically-later installments, doesn't mean she doesn't have it. Hell, you could argue that she may have used it to a certain extent to jump in front of Batman to protect him in BvS and when jumping the bomb out of the building in Justice League (Zack Snyder's version anyway) and maybe even the final scene of Wonder Woman when she's jumping into action over a river right before the credits roll.

Wish reversal

• Did the woman who was killed directly by the man's wish ("I wish you'd drop dead") come back to life after he renounced his wish? They even cut back to them later on and she still wasn't moving which leads me to believe she stayed dead but that seems inconsistent with the tone of that scene.

Diana's nightgown

• So the random guy whose body Steve takes over, a single man who lives alone, just happens to have a nightgown in Diana's size that she's easily able to put on? Or does Diana carry one with her everywhere just in case she gets lucky?
  • Maybe it was leftover from an ex-girlfriend's or one-night stand that he once had? Could have been his mother's who passed away? Maybe he likes cross-dressing? Lots of possibilities.

Why couldn't Steve come back in his own body?

• Did this serve any purpose to the overall movie? The cost of him being brought back is that Diana's powers get taken away, not that he has to take over another man's body. And he and Diana never consider the ramifications of him taking over the man's body anyway. All this development seems to do is give the film some unfortunate implications, so why couldn't they have axed the concept and just had Steve come back as himself?
  • The point is that him coming back is a lie, just like everything else the Dreamstone does. As long as Diana believes in the lie, she's completely blind to the Unfortunate Implications and seemingly has him back with no consequences, but once she accepts the truth she has to give him up because to do otherwise would be morally repugnant. Getting a bit meta, if Steve had been brought back in a new body and the only consequence was her losing her powers, she might ultimately consider that a decent trade, if not for the fact that she needed her powers to save the world. By putting him in another man's body, there was no way for the movie to end with him still alive.
  • Having been blown up, his own body would have been obliterated, if not vapourised.
  • The stone can create an arsenal of nuclear weapons out of nowhere and turn a woman into a felid mutant. If its power had limits that were short of bringing people back from the dead and that was the reason for the significance of Handsome Man, that should've been explained at some point. As it is, it seems as though the powers of the stone are pretty limitless.
    • Fridge Brilliance. The Dreaming Stone feeds off of the act of wish granting, and taking from what is valuable to the person, and becomes more powerful the more this occurs. When it was first found, it had been centuries since it had last granted a wish so it was at its weakest. Instead of immediately materializing things out of thin air instantly, it was probably limited to just playing with probability (guy has an extra coffee on hand instead of the coffee coming into existence in the man's hand; gradually giving Barbara Diana's qualities instead of just transforming her instantly). Instead of resurrecting Steve with his body, it instead is limited to taking another man's body and places Steve's soul in it. It's limited to manipulating variable in reality instead of outright materialization. It also took time to gradually change Barbara to be more like Diana instead of doing it instantly. As more wishes are granted, the Dreaming Stone gains more steam and the wishes start happening faster and are more obviously Reality Warping. And in the end it was able to materialize hundreds of nukes out of nowhere — the height of its power.

Logistics of the jet trip to Cairo

• As Film Theory points out in this video, no jet could have reached Africa from the US East Coast, let alone Cairo as they would have run out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic. How did Diana and Steve not worry about that when flying across the Atlantic? Secondly, radar works by bouncing off physical objects, so her invisibility spell wouldn't have made them go off radar as it does not double as an intangibility spell. A more easier way would have been to use the possessed guy's passport for Steve instead, as only Diana can see Steve as shown in the mirror scene.
  • Radar is still based on radio waves, aka electromagnetic radiation just like light, so an invisibility spell could work even if you are looking at it from a technical standpoint and not a magical handwave standpoint. That said both the fuel and passport issues stuck out to me while watching as well.
  • Even if you use the possessed guy's passport for Steve, a return trip to Cairo on a commercial flight isn't cheap.

Some of those nukes should have been real

• The president wishes for the USA to have more nukes, and for them to be placed closer to Russia. However, this leads to the Russians taking it as a provocation and launching their own nukes, which meant the USA was forced to retaliate by launching all their nukes, which would have included ones existing before the wish was even made, as it's hard to believe only wish-created nukes were launched. More importantly, the Russian nukes were never created by any wish whatsoever. (There is one person who wished for nukes, but he wasn't Russian) The order to launch wasn't a wish, either, it was a response by the Russians. How could all of these already existing nukes be affected by the recinding of the President's wish? There should still have been dozens of nuclear strikes in the USA and at least a few in Russia as well.
  • Pretty much all the tensions happening in this moment were a result of wishes being granted, so once they were renounced the decison to launch the nukes had no bearing and thus was reverted along with all the fabricated ones.
  • Or maybe, just before the reversals started, some random horrified witness to the missile launches cried out "I wish that wasn't happening!", and that person didn't renounce their wish.
  • We see one missile exploding in midair rather than vanishing, so it's possible that's a regular missile self destructing to abort the attack after the wished silos vanish.

Is Barbara still the Cheetah?

• I mean, in the montage of everybody in the world renouncing their wishes, seems kinda intentional that we don't actually see her saying it.
  • It's been suggested that Max renouncing his wish to become the Dreamstone also indirectly renounced the wishes that he had granted for everyone else, including Barbara. Since it's unlikely every last person on the planet was convinced to renounce their wish just from Diana's speech, that seems the most probable explanation.
  • It would be pretty out of character for Barbara to just renounce her wish when mere minutes earlier she was fully prepared to die as an alternative. The most direct answer would have to be that Max renouncing his wish was all it took to make her human again.
  • Barbara wished directly on the Dreamstone, not on Lord. She'd be human again because the "apex predator" stuff came from him giving her power later, but she should still have Diana's "strong, cool, sexy". It's very likely she was intended to die since renouncing clearly wasn't on the agenda, but for whatever reason a shot of her alive was added in editing.

The "Star Wars" program

• If the President of DCEU America in 1984 is some other guy who presumably has replaced Ronald Reagan in their history, how come he mentions the "Star Wars" satellite program like it was an idea that was still tossed around in this universe?
  • Why do you think that the presence of an alternate-1984-POTUS would exclude that satellite program? Often times alternate histories share a lot of things in common with our real-life history.

Was it really cheating?

• All Diana did was to find a way to get back to her horse, which is a entirely reasonable thing to do. She was already winning and visibly gained no further lead after sliding down the hill, so I am not seeing exactly how could that be argued as her cheating her way into winning. Yes, she deserved to be desqualified for missing a checkpoint, but getting publicly admonished by Antiope like that and accused of dishonesty was kinda unfair.
  • I don't think it's that unfair. She tried to disregard the rules of the challenge to avoid having to accept that she got distracted and fell off her horse. And it's not like Antiope put her on display in front of everyone and made a big spectacle out of it; she merely pulled Diana off to the side and then gave her a lecture once she protested. Diana didn't deserve anything less than that.
  • At no moment do we hear any rules for that contest, and Antiope doesn't cite any when she is chewing on Diana. And yes, it is obvious that hitting all the checkpoints was one of the rules, and Diana should have been disqualified, but Antiope outright calls her a cheater and accuses her of taking the "short path", which was not the case as she had exactly the same lead as before she fell from the horse, she gained nothing. Also, she did not pull Diana off view, the while thing happened in front of all the audience.
  • 1.) There's a subtle difference between calling someone a cheater and simply stating that they cheated, which is what Antiope did. 2.) As you acknowledge, just because we don't hear the stated rules doesn't mean there weren't any, unless you're suggesting that Antiope made Diana forfeit for violating a rule that doesn't exist. Presumably one of the rules was "You must stay on your horse for the entire challenge" or "You must activate every checkpoint in order to validate your victory." Antiope probably knew the location of the checkpoint Diana missed and that there was a chute nearby that she could've used to regain the lead. (My guess is that the chute was intended as an easy return route for anyone who fell behind.) 3.) My point still stands that she didn't start berating Diana for cheating until after Diana started to whine about forfeiting; she also did it in a low enough voice that it's doubtful anyone in the stands could hear her, so focused were they on the success of the actual victor. There wasn't really a more ideal point for her to have taken Diana out of the running, either, since any earlier and they would've had trouble pulling her off of her horse, and any later and Diana would have falsely won the competition and robbed the actual winner of the glory and celebration she deserved. This comes back to the fact that it's Diana's fault she cheated, not Antiope's for calling her out on it. Odds are that if she had gotten to make the ending throw, there would've been an even bigger spectacle in the aftermath that would humiliate her even more, so Antiope likely spared her a lot of that by what she did.
  • Another Wonder Woman property touched upon the notion that Hippolyta can't be seen as showing blatant favoritism toward Diana over the other Amazons, due to the fact that her origins are different than theirs' — formed from clay in that work and sired by Zeus in this one. It was also established in the first movie that Antiope is willing to forgo going easy on Diana in order to train her to become a better warrior, so that she might have acted unreasonably here isn't all that unreasonable.

Consistency with other movies

• So how does all that stuff about Diana going under the radar since her debut film mesh with her still being active during the events of this one? She's shown disabling the security cameras during the mall heist, but it doesn't seem like that should do anything to protect her secret unless the footage is also stored on the cameras. And even then, there are points in the other movies where she alludes to her own inactivity as a hero just as the other characters like Bruce do. Is 1984 covering the brief stint where she came out of hiding before going back into it until Bruce's actions coax her out again? Just how active has she been since the events of 1918?
  • If you presume that everyone's memories except Diana's were wiped of the whole apocalyptic ordeal, then she doesn't need to acknowledge events that technically never happened except for her.
  • Could be a butterfly effect from a certain speedster tampering with the natural flow of time.

Does Diana really see Steve’s original face?

• Or did she mean that metaphorically when she said that she only sees him and that only the viewers see him that way so they can be comfortable with the familiar face of Chris Pine?
  • Her attachment to him and struggle to let go would make a lot more sense if it were Steve's own face that she saw, and it would explain why she thought they couldn't use Handsome Man's passport to get him to Cairo, but then there's that scene where Steve looks in the mirror and sees the other guy's face. Unless you were to argue that the effect only works on Diana or only doesn't work on Steve.

Wish Reversal Pt. 2

• How about that guy who asked for a coffee early in the movie? How does that wish revert?
  • The whole "Be Careful What You Wish For" thing usually only applies to "big", life-changing wishes, rather than smaller wishes.
  • Simple — the coffee vanishes from his digestive system, while the cup vanishes from the landfill it probably ended up in.

Why is Diana allowed to compete?

• In the first movie, Hippolyta didn't want Diana participating in any warrior training, at least not until she was older than she appears to have been during this movie's prologue. So why was she allowed to openly take part in the obstacle course, to the point of it being supervised by her mother?
  • Diana was already being tutored before she decided to train for combat. That would imply that Amazons have some form of education system, which would also have sports and other recreational activities. As far as Hippolyta knew, her daughter was only training to be a star athlete, not a frontline warrior.

What happened to coffee guy?

• What happened to the guy who wished for a cup of coffee at the beginning of the movie? All the other characters who make wishes suffer some horrible consequences as a result. Seems like Disproportionate Retribution if all he wanted was some coffee.
  • Presumably a minor wish means a minor consequence. So, like, indigestion.

Steve wishing for the Dreamstone's destruction

• Why couldn't Steve have touched Maxwell Lord while they were handcuffed together in the White House and said "I wish you were destroyed"? Since Maxwell Lord destroyed the stone itself by wishing he became the stone, couldn't he himself have been destroyed? Or would that have violated the rules of the Dreamstone?
  • The Dreamstone can't be destroyed by its own power because its own power would be waning during the destruction. Sort of like how you can't kill yourself by strangulation with your bare hands.
  • Simple. Maxwell destroys himself, but then then reforms a second later. "I was destroyed, satisfying the conditions of the stated wish, but you didn't say that I have to remain in that state for very long."

Alistair's wish

• When Max is allowing everyone's wishes to come true, Alistair wishes Max would just come home. Wouldn't that mean Max suddenly gets blinked back to be with Alistair?
  • He did end up reuniting with Alistair thanks to Diana's intervention. As the movie shows elsewhere, not all wishes are granted instantaneously.
  • The above answer is incorrect. Alistair had already made his wish ("I wish for your greatness"), so he couldn't wish for anything more.

Touching everyone

• If Maxwell can wish (by proxy) that broadcasting his image via particle beams count as him touching everyone, why couldn't he have earlier turned to a flunky and gone "Oh wow so many visitors and so little time! Don't you just wish I didn't have to lay my hands on them all individually and do it by sight?"?