There are six-- I mean, five replicants.

July 21, 2008 12:03 PM

I have a plot question concerning the movie The Dark Knight. If you haven't seen the movie, you won't be able to answer my question, so there are definitely spoilers inside.

At the end of the movie, when Gordon and Batman are discussing how to cover-up Two-Face's crimes, Gordon mentions that five people were killed by Two-Face, including two cops. The problem for me is that I only count three people killed by Two-Face, one of which is a cop. The cop in the bar was killed, and the mob boss and his driver. That makes three. Ramirez, the other crooked cop, wasn't killed, as far as I can tell, because the flipped coin came up clean. So even if you count Harvey Dent as one of the killed (which doesn't seem right to me), that leaves one person unaccounted for; two if you don't include Dent. Can anyone help me figure out who the missing people are? Thanks.

posted by EatenByAGrue to media & arts (14 comments total)

Bartender.
posted by mkb at 12:12 PM on July 21, 2008

I think Dent does count as one because his death can't be pinned on the Joker. Though why Gordon wouldn't say he killed him in self-defense is still a mystery.
posted by nameless.k at 12:15 PM on July 21, 2008

30 minutes or so of footage were cut from the film. It is speculated here that some of Harvey Dent's final rampage was part of that footage. I expect you'll find the missing victims on DVD in due course.
posted by rentalkarma at 12:16 PM on July 21, 2008

So glad you asked this, I had the same question brewing in my mind!
posted by Asherah at 12:32 PM on July 21, 2008

The Joker killed a cop in Gotham General Hospital who came back inside to see why Dent hadn't yet been brought out. The Joker may have also killed Dent's nurse or some other hospital employee in order to gain access. These two deaths could plausibly have been attributed to Dent.
posted by inconsequentialist at 12:40 PM on July 21, 2008

The question is discussed in this thread.
posted by Knappster at 12:48 PM on July 21, 2008

it is not clear that dent killed falcone, just his driver. Just throwin that out there.
posted by Large Marge at 1:47 PM on July 21, 2008

Large Marge, I agree that Falcone, or whatever the name of that guy was in the car, wasn't shown as being killed by the Joker, but on the other hand, they showed the Joker putting on his seatbelt while the other guy did not, and then the car flipping over, which strongly implies he is dead.

Knappster, that thread doesn't come to any firm conclusions.

inconsequentialist, if the Joker actually killed those people, then why not just blame the Joker for them?

mkb, I don't think the bartender died, so much as left, but even if he did, that still leaves a missing dead cop. I don't believe Dent counts as one of the dead cops, even if he's one of the five, as I don't think Gordon, a cop, would have called a district attorney a cop.

rentalkarma, you're probably right. It's not as if this mistake hasn't been made before. (See my title for this question.) On the other hand, it seems like it would have been easy to re-dub Gary Oldman's line to correct the number of dead.

But thanks for the responses.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 3:28 PM on July 21, 2008

Also, nameless.k, while I don't want to derail this thread (especially since it's my own), the point of blaming Batman was to deflect the blame away from Dent, as they needed his reputation to be kept intact so Dent would continue to serve as inspiration for the city. If Gorden had explained that he shot Dent in self-defense, that would have similarly harmed Dent's reputation.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 3:30 PM on July 21, 2008

30 minutes or so of footage were cut from the film. It is speculated here that some of Harvey Dent's final rampage was part of that footage. I expect you'll find the missing victims on DVD in due course.

When Gordon said that, I was doing the mental math in my head too. I'm sure he was counting Moroni and his driver, but that does only add up to three with the crooked cop in the bar. Hopefully the DVD version rentalkarma mentions will clarify this.
posted by Nelsormensch at 3:34 PM on July 21, 2008

At the time, Gordon wasn't in a position to know that the Joker had killed them or that the Joker was even at the hospital with Dent. What he is in a position to know is that Dent escaped from the hospital and that two others in charge of his care and transport had not been accounted for and were likely dead. He might assume at that point that Dent was the one who killed them in order to escape and exact further revenge even though he would be mistaken.
posted by inconsequentialist at 5:23 PM on July 21, 2008

Are we supposed to think that we had an omniscient view of all of Dent's killings before his death? Perhaps the number wasn't supposed to correspond exactly to our limited observations between then and the hospital, and implies more killing than we actually saw.

Or, it's a continuity issue, due to oversight or scene deletions.
posted by SpacemanStix at 6:25 PM on July 21, 2008

inconsequentialist, I don't want to belabor the point, but I will point out that an entire bus of people were missing from the hospital, so it seems unlikely to me that Gordon would know that two of those missing people were actually dead and yet not know that the Joker killed them. (I'm a little fuzzy on the timeline, but I don't believe that the hostages were rescued before Gordon got captured by Two-Face.) I am assuming that Two-Face did the typical villain's monologue and told Gordon about what he did between the hospital and that point, which is why Gordon knew the number of dead people. But unless Two-Face took credit for some off-screen killings or for those killed by the Joker, the numbers still don't add up.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 6:31 PM on July 21, 2008

The people on the bus were all present in the building across from where Gordon and some of his men were standing before he got the call from Two-Face. Granted, the positions of hostage and captor were reversed and so an accurate count would have been improbable. But we don't necessarily have to think that the cop from the hospital was to be on the bus at all. He may have been supposed to ride in his own car or another police vehicle and never reported back to the station. I had also assumed at one point that Dent told Gordon who he had killed, but after watching it again, we seem to see everything they talk about from the time Gordon gets there to the time Dent dies.

In any case, my essential point is that there are at least five on screen deaths that we witness (one of which is Dent's) between Gordon's visit to Dent and Gordon's discussion with Batman at the end that might have been reported to Gordon and which he might have thought were Dent's fault. I'm just trying to think of the most plausible way to explain what seems to me to be the most glaring plot hole after two viewings.
posted by inconsequentialist at 7:11 PM on July 21, 2008