Every plothole, continuity error and inconsistency in Season One.
I love Season 1. It is arguably Telltale's best game ever and it is a masterpiece that will never be replicated. However, after replaying it quite a few times, it's hard not to notice all of its little flaws. Thus, I've decided to compile a list of every plothole, inconsistency and continuity error in the game.
I'll say it ahead of time that I absolutely love the first season - it's one of my favorite games in the world and I'm not bashing on it - the purpose of this post is simply to be an interesting read. I will also be writing down a few points in the story where I thought there was a continuity error, but after replaying the game, I noticed there was an explanation and it wasn't really an error. These remarks will be tagged with the word "DISCLAIMER". I will also occasionally try to offer an explanation or theory to certain errors that might be explainable but weren't made clear.
It's also worth noting that most of these holes in the thread of storytelling come from technical glitches or simply continuity errors, since the first season was well-written and was rarely inconsistent in its storytelling.
I don't plan on doing one of these for Season 2 or A New Frontier. The reason being that those games were technically upgraded compared to the first season, which lessened the continuity errors a lot more, and albeit the writing in those two seasons were quite shittier and I'd have plenty of content in its flawed storytelling, I feel like most of you guys are already aware of every flaw and inconsistency in those games, which would make for a dull read - whereas Season One was so great that most of us overlook some of its flaws.
So, I hope you'll enjoy this post! Feel free to correct my remarks if I'm wrong, and please do add any other mistakes I might have missed. I'm doing this out of boredom - I didn't went around playing the game a hundred times and checking for mistakes in every different dialogue option or every different choice the game offers. I'll add to my post any other inconsistencies if I find more.
Episode 1 - A NEW DAY
Hershel refers to Clementine as Lee's daughter, even if he is told that she is not his daughter.
If Lee remains silent when Hershel says his leg is swollen up, Hershel says Lee doesn't talk much and wishes he had five like him - implying that he's talking about his children - but in reality he has seven children: Maggie, Billy, Shawn, Arnold, Lacey, Rachel and Susie.
Upon introduction, Kenny tells Lee that he's heard he's on his way to Macon - even if Lee doesn't say anything about it to Shawn or Hershel.
It's kind of surprising that walkers managed to sneak up to Shawn and Duck, considering that there are nothing but open vast fields around the farm - making it impossible for walkers to go unseen. Even if Shawn was trapped under the tractor, it wouldn't have been enough time for walkers to reach him and Duck.
If you don't do anything to save either Duck or Shawn, the game appears to consider that as the exact same as if you had saved Duck.
Carley puts her neck on the line saving Lee & co, but is immediately against the idea of helping out Irene - even though saving Irene was arguably easier and less dangerous than saving Lee and the others on the street.
- Despite this being inconsistent behavior, it could be that being indecisive about her values is simply one of her character traits (ex: she changes her mind on whether or not Lee should tell the group about his past).
Clementine's finger bandage often disappears.
Pillows don't really muffle gunshots.
- Although, since The Walking Dead takes place in a universe where guns aren't portrayed realistically - just like every movie and videogame in existence - I suppose we could let this slide.
I wonder how Irene boarded herself up from the outside.
- A little story I came up with in my mind was that her boyfriend got bit and locked her inside the motel room to keep her safe, before wandering off to die alone - but from what Irene tells us, it's implied she saw her boyfriend die, so I can't imagine someone boarding her inside that room.
Even if you remain silent when Kenny asks you if you know what you're doing with Clementine at the farm, he'll act as if Lee told him he's clueless at the end of this episode.
Clementine seems really heartbroken when she tells Lee her walkie-talkie is broken, when in fact, it's not. It's hard to believe she'd be able to lie to Lee about it being broken with such conviction, unless she really knows how to put up an act. This one is a bit on an ambiguous one, since we don't know when the Stranger contacted Clementine, so I have two theories to explain it.
Either Clem thought her walkie was broken, but later on was contacted by the Stranger - perhaps during the three month skip - and from then kept the truth hidden from Lee.
Or the Stranger contacted her somewhere at the end of A New Day, and she actively lied to Lee about her walkie being broken since the beginning - but I doubt this, since I don't think Clementine could have put so much emotion and conviction into lying to Lee. Long story short, even though there's no reason she would think her walkie-talkie is broken, I think she truly believed it was at first - so I think my first theory is the correct one. But ultimately, this isn't cleared up in the game, so all we can do is guess. Might not be as plothole-y as some other things on here, but I'll still chalk it up here.
DISCLAIMER: @Deltino has pretty much solved this mystery. It can be assumed that Clementine's walkie-talkie ran out of battery, or that the batteries were knocked out of place when she fell in the drugstore - and her being a kid, she wrongfully thought it was broken. Then, at the end of Episode 2, when Doug/Carley gives her batteries from the station wagon, she gets her radio working again - which would mean Clementine started talking to the Stranger in the three week timeskip between the second and third episode. I suppose this is no longer a plothole, and thanks to Deltino for solving it!
Episode 2 - STARVED FOR HELP
You get the option to ask Ben if Mr. Parker was bitten, when you first find them in the woods. However, if you let Parker get eaten and bring back a wounded Travis who ends up reanimating, Kenny will accuse Ben of lying about him being bitten - even though Ben was talking about Parker earlier in that scene.
It appears to be impossible to get Parker out of the trap - but Lee and the group could have easily untied the chain from around the tree and carried Parker back to the motel with the trap still latched around his leg. The chain isn't wrapped shut by a padlock, it was simply knotted around the tree.
When you talk to Brenda when you first arrive at the dairy, all you see behind her is a wall - the dining room is nowhere to be seen.
When Lee and Mark are attacked by a downpour of arrows and make their way back to the gate behind the tractor, the tractor gets stuck on two walkers on two different occasions. Mark says they're walkers they pushed off the fence - but their models don't match the models of the zombies that Lee pushes off the fence earlier in the scene, and the walkers are too far from the fence to have been pushed off of it.
Why don't the bandits just raid the dairy considering that the gate through which Lee and Mark escape isn't electrified? The electric fence isn't that tall, either - and from what we see in Episode 3, the bandits don't seem very lenient when it comes to not getting their supplies.
When you sabotage the generator, Lee removes the conveyor belt and takes it with him. However, when Andy checks it out, he doesn't even wonder how in the hell the belt would've disappeared if the belt compartment is screwed shut - which means someone would've had to have taken the belt on purpose, however Andy seems to skim over this really, really obvious detail.
It is implied that the St. John's always butcher their victims in the barn - in that case, how did they sneak Mark from the house to the barn in order to cut off his legs? Kenny says he heard a noise in the backroom of the barn - which further implies he probably heard Mark yelling back there or something. I also believe that the scratch marks on the house's floor was them dragging Mark inside the house after butchering him - which further proves he was taken to the barn, then taken back to the house.
- Even though Lee finds a bunch of used medical supplies when he snoops around upstairs in the dinner scene - which could imply Mark was butchered inside the house - he also doesn't find enough blood or cutting tools in the house to imply Mark was "prepared" in the house instead of inside the barn.
Even if you pick up the sickle from the slaughter room, Lilly/Kenny will still attack Danny with a sickle, even though there wasn't a second one inside the slaughter room. Continuity error here.
Even if you didn't fix Carley's radio in the first episode, she'll bring up the battery incident at the end of the episode when she puts batteries inside the camcorder.
It is hard to believe that Jolene managed to sneak into the motel and steal Clementine's hat with no one noticing.
Episode 3 - LONG ROAD AHEAD
If the dialogue option "Things could be worse" - not exact words - is picked when Lilly and Kenny argue after returning from the supply run, the conversation will roughly go as follows:
Lee: Things could be worse! When's the last time someone got bitten?
Ben: from atop the RV. Are you counting the St. John's?
Kenny: shocked. Jesus, Ben!
The thing is, I can't quite understand what Ben means by this. Nobody in the group got bit - Larry died of a heart attack and was put down by Kenny, and Mark was butchered for food. I do have a few explanations for this one, though.Technically, Brenda was bit by undead Mark, and Andy and Danny were probably bitten too if you don't kill them straight away and leave them to the walkers. But even then, Ben doesn't see them get bit himself. My guess here is that Lee told him about how Brenda got bit by Mark, but this remark by Ben still seems off to me.
On the other hand, this could be Ben making a dark joke - since the entire group "bit" Mark's legs as they ate them. It could explain Kenny's shocked, "Jesus, Ben!", but it still doesn't make sense because Ben doesn't seem like the dark humor type. If there's something I'm missing here, let me know.
Once again, even if you didn't fix Carley's radio, she'll bring up the battery incident when you confront her about the flashlight.
Not as plothole-y, but when Lee shows Lilly the medicine he found, the bandits immediately show up - which means that in the span of a minute or two it took for Lee to reach Lilly and show her the evidence, the bandits somehow noticed their payment was gone, and attacked. I have two theories for this one.
It was either a case of bad timing - meaning that as soon as Lee picked up the stash of medicine, a bandit just happened to check if their stash was there, noticed it was gone, and immediately attacked with his buddies - of course, Ben wouldn't say anything if he saw a bandit checking of their payment while on lookout. This doesn't make sense, however, since it's implied that Ben deposits the payment on the vent at night - hence the broken flashlight - and the bandits would probably retrieve the medicine at night too, since it's hard to be sneaky during the day.
The most logical explanation however, is that the bandits kept a few guys hidden in the woods, watching the motel at all times. When Lee took away the stash from the vent, they saw it and reported back to the other bandits, and immediately attacked. This one seems like the explanation that makes the most sense to me, since it explains how they saw their payment was gone so quickly.
DISCLAIMER: I used to think that Clementine unlocking the door of the train station was a mistake since she wouldn't have been able to reach the lock, but it's actually not. When you walk inside, you can clearly see that the door was held shut by a bolt fixated on the top of the doorframe - close enough for Clementine to reach.
Those two walkers inside the train station literally show up out of nowhere.
Christa mentions in the train station that Clementine is eight - but at this point, Clementine would be nine.
- But it's possible that she wasn't keeping track of days, and the Stranger probably was - thus, it's likely that the Stranger only found out about Clementine's birthday after she'd already turned nine. Whether or not he informed her of her age is unknown to us.
Episode 4 - AROUND EVERY CORNER
If you tell Kenny, "Get her!", when he sneaks up on Molly, she'll still sweep him off his feet and try to kill Ken, but Lee yells, "No, he's with us!", and she stops - even though she probably wouldn't, seeing Lee told Kenny to attack her.
Kind of a nitpick, but when Lee returns to the manor after the sewers and sees Kenny shitfaced, he asks where he found the alcohol - even though he should know he found it on the dining room table, since you get the option to look at the bottles.
In Crawford, at one point, Kenny and Brie return with the fuel and Lee has to help them close the doors against a bunch of walkers. But when they rush inside the highschool, it's clear that they came up a stairwell (the Crawford hub takes place on the school's second floor), and there are no hallways perpendicular to it - so it's impossible that a herd of walkers managed to follow Kenny and Brie up a set of stairs so quickly, and those walkers didn't come from anywhere else than the stairs.
Again with the Crawford zombie inconsistencies - at one point in Crawford, Christa and Vernon get boxed inside the nursery room by a bunch of walkers - but there is no way those walkers found their way inside the building.
If Lee suggests to shoot the medicine safe in order to get it open, Vernon says that the noise would just get them killed - but just a few minutes earlier, Lee fired a bunch of rounds into the walkers standing in front of the infirmary and they turned out okay.
We all know Ben - despite how lovable he might be - is a big dumbass. But c'mon, it's impossible he didn't realize he took away that hatchet from a door that was holding back dozens of walkers. This might not be a plothole to some, but this felt like - to me - inconsistent with Ben's intelligence - even if it might not be plentiful, it's still too much of a retarded thing for Ben to do.
When Lee shoots his way up the bell tower with a shotgun, he shoots about a dozen shells with that thing - more than that shotgun's capacity. I don't know which shotgun model it is, but it's doubtful it'd have a twelve-shot capacity, and that it would be fully loaded.
Ben gets grabbed by the undead Oberson Crawford, and Lee has to save him by shooting the walker. However, the way shotguns work is that they shoot several pellets that spread - so it's impossible to be accurate with shotguns, and one of the pellets probably would've hit Ben as well and killed him.
Episode 5 - NO TIME LEFT
Even though the cancer patients were armed, it's rather kek to imagine them giving black eyes and bruises to the characters who stayed behind to look after the boat.
DISCLAIMER: I used to think that the group punching a hole through the attic wall to get to an adjacent house was an error, but after going back to the fourth episode and replaying the scene at the backyard, I managed to see that there was indeed a house butted up against the manor. It's tough to see because the surroundings of the manor are covered in dense foliage, but it's there.
If you let Kenny "die" in the alleyway, then how come Christa and Omid didn't see him escape? They were keeping a lookout from above, with a clear sightline - they would've clearly seen Kenny either getting eaten or escaping.
I think that Kenny's second "death" - the one that occurs if Ben dies in the fourth episode - was dumb, and again, it wasn't exactly inconsistent to the plot - but it felt inconsistent to Lee's intelligence. Kenny tells Lee to give the Stranger a headsup, Lee agrees, but then Lee drops the walkie - but why would Lee agree to give the Stranger a headsup in the first place? It's very dumb to give your enemy a warning that you're coming for him, and Lee usually proves to be a sensible guy.
When Lee, Christa and Omid have to cross the sign, Christa says Omid is the lightest. Even though Omid is a bit of a manlet, I doubt Christa would be heavier than him, especially since she's slim and Omid isn't exactly skinny.
The Stranger has two bullets in his handgun. The first one can either be used by Clementine to kill him or used by Lee to shoot the Stranger in the head after strangling him, and the second one is used to kill the walker at the door. However, if you strangle the Stranger and save the second bullet, the gun will still only fire one bullet before clicking when Lee kills the zombie at the door.
- In fact, the Stranger can actually have three bullets in his gun - if you fail to tackle him during the fight, he will shoot Lee in the gut.
Clementine drags a passed out thirty-seven year-old man inside a jewelry store. Obvious one here, but still.
Comments
I don't know if it happens every time, but there is a path in the drug store where everyone is fighting and Lee confronts Larry and he's like "It's Larry, right?" But no one ever said Larry's name.
The problem's actually a code-related thing, and it isn't just silence that causes it, either. Kenny doesn't use the right responses at all in that scene. The order is all jumbled up, so he uses the wrong lines for whatever you said to him earlier ("I think I'm doing okay" "I have no idea" etc).
I'm going to assume, given that Doug/Carley give Clementine batteries at the end of episode 2, that the walkie didn't technically break-- the batteries probably came out when she fell, and Clem being a kid, assumed it was broken. So she puts those batteries they gave her in, then a few days later, the Stranger ends up contacting her when trying to use his own radio.
Other things to note about that scene:
It's the same hatchet that Ben gave to Lee back at the mansion.
The hatchet is blocking the same set of doors they came through in the first place.
The zombies randomly disappear when Lee and Molly walk by. Then when Ben mentions that he took the hatchet, they suddenly bust in out of nowhere.
It's a glass door, and the zombies that chased Kenny and Brie have been pounding on it for at least 10 minutes.
Believe it or not, he can actually have three. If you don't stop him when he tries to pick up the gun, he'll manage to shoot Lee, which changes the fight scene slightly. Schrodinger's gun-- the Stranger can have one, two or three bullets in his handgun.
In slight defense, the jewelry store she drags him into is right behind where he passes out. You can see the sign of the jewelry store behind him.
And finally, let me add some of my own:
When Doug/Carley show up at the dairy, Lee tells them to try to find a back way in instead of the front gate. Yet when the fight with Andy happens a few minutes, they're suddenly at the front gate again.
If you don't shoot the girl in the street, why do the zombies still attack the drugstore? If you shoot her, it makes sense; you got their attention, and they followed you into the drugstore. But when you leave the girl, none of them would have seen Lee or Kenny, so they randomly decided to start banging on the door to the drugstore.
Not so much a plothole, but Vernon's line when he first meets Lee-- "Are you from Crawford? Don't lie to me, I'll know..." That question doesn't even make sense. If you were able to tell he was lying about being from Crawford... then why did you even ask him to begin with? By that logic, you would have already known the answer.
When Lee goes out to search the doctor in episode 4, how did he get back inside the building? He ran back towards the fence, then when the next scene loads, he comes through the door that leads to the back alley. The fence is way too high and has barbed wire on it, so how did he get around it?
The location of the hospital in episode 5 is wrong. The sewer Lee ends up in is just outside Crawford, right? And it's right next to the river. That means that the hospital should be somewhere inside Crawford. But in episode 5, you can see Crawford off in the distance, and the river is nowhere to be seen from the roof.
Huh, I've played through the drugstore scene quite a few times and haven't seen this. Might have to try to play through it again, though.
Actually, I don't see why it wouldn't make sense. Vernon probably didn't know everybody in Crawford since there were so many people there, and by "I'll know", he's stating that he'll be able to tell if he's lying or not. I think Vernon was just nervous and wanted to make an empty threat or something.
Other than that, your other assumptions do seem correct to me, and I think you are right when it comes to Clementine's radio just being out of battery rather than broken. Thanks a lot for the input - it makes a lot more sense that she'd have started talking to the Stranger between Starved For Help and Long Road Ahead.
Oh, it was most certainly implied. It's easy to miss, but when Kenny and Lee return to the motor inn at the beginning of episode 3, there's a quick scene of Clementine talking on the walkie. Obviously, we're led to believe it's one of her pretend talks with her parents... but then it hits you, and you realize that wasn't the case at all.
Yeah, I've played through the game so many times but I've never picked up on that. I edited my post with your input and you being credited, so people know that technically, it's no longer a plothole.
But I thought Season 1 was perfect and flawless in every conceivable way since it was led by the legendary Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin.
There is no game without a single sin.
Those are great points but at least they aren't as bad as the ones from A New Frontier because FUCK THE NEW FRONTIER!!!
Now do one for Season 2
Well, like I said above, I don't intend to do one for Season 2 since I'd have a lot less content to work on since Telltale upped their game in tech and in continuity errors, and the flaws in that season are obvious - whereas the interest of this post was to take a game everybody considers to be flawless and expose, well, its flaws.
Plus, I don't currently have my copy of Season 2, so I can't play it xD but if a lot of people like this post, I might try to do one for Season 2 or even A New Frontier.
There are some you have missed.
In Episode 3, when Lee meets Chuck in his home car, Chuck mentions that he already met everyone else before he encountered Lee which makes me wonder: How did he manage to meet every single member of Lee's group that fast? Before you cut the train loose, Chuck is nowhere to be seen and it takes Lee 20 seconds to cut the train loose so how did Chuck manage to meet everyone in 20 seconds?
Chuck shows up out of nowhere on the corner of the train car when Lee is looking at his stuff. It didn't seem like he used any of the storage doors or the normal door of the car. If he was in the car before Lee came in, how did Lee not even notice him?
In Episode 4, when Lee tries to lock the armory door while trying to escape Crawford, Kenny asks him "You didn't close that door behind us?" which is incorrect because the group weren't far away from the door and Lee was just trying to lock it, so Kenny should have said "Can't you close this door?". Where did you learn grammar, Telltale?
So it's confirmed that Chuck used his last bullet to kill himself in the sewers but he died right near the entrance of Vernon's bunker so how come Vernon or his group never notice the gunshot sound right outside their bunker? I don't think their door and the sign which was covering their hole on the wall was enough soundproof for them to not hear. If they did know what happened out of there, why didn't Vernon ask Lee "Were you looking for that guy who was being eaten by those walkers outside our safe place?" ?
In Episode 5, when the walkers arrive at the mansion, Lee's group never bothered to lock the boat shed with the shovel so they could prevent them from getting through the backyard.
The walker that grabs Lee's leg through the doggy door somehow managed to open the pet door without the dog collar.
I was only kidding. It would be pretty difficult to condense every plot hole or inconsistency in that game or ANF!
I feel like some of the stuff here is a bit overly nitpicky though and when something is uncertain and I think you have to give it a bit of leeway. Pretty good writeup regardless.
Glad you liked it! Heh, I guess the purpose of this post was indeed to be nitpicky, haha.
I had thought about inserting that one about Chuck meeting the group in twenty seconds, but I assumed he had had more time to do it. I had no idea he only has a span of 20 seconds to meet the group, so I guess that's another one for the list.
They probably did hear the gunshot, but they didn't went out looking for its source. if they heard a gunshot in the sewers, it's doubtful they'd endanger themselves by going out and investigating the source.
To me, this is kind of more of an oversight by the characters. They were frightened by the walkers, so they rushed inside the mansion and forgot about closing the shed.
Wow, amazing catch! Never noticed that. Real great continuity error there.
I thought this was really interesting, but here's what I thought this one was:
I thought that Christa was pregnant at this point so... she'd be slightly heavier than Omid.
Because I played a demo of S2 before playing S1, I thought all the stuff like when she vomited after Lee dug up the dog, when she got emotional after watching the Crawford video with the pregnant mother and how Omid gets unexpectedly angry at you for helping him get on the train rather than Christa was because... she was pregnant?
Was Christa already pregnant in S1?
Yeah, it's heavily implied that Christa was already pregnant in the first season. It's foreshadowed a lot, in those instances you mentioned and many more.
I thought the same as you, but back then, Christa was probably in her second month or something, meaning that she would barely have anything heavy in her womb. I doubt whatever fetus she had inside her made her heavier than Omid, especially since men are usually heavier than women because of muscle mass and all.
Also, thanks for liking the post! I put quite some effort trying to nitpick my way through the whole season.