The Major Plot Hole That Never Got Fixed In The Walking Dead
AMC's long-running zombie horror drama The Walking Dead is a great show, but it's not a flawless show. Like all shows – especially ones that burn through this much story – it has its fair share of plot holes, continuity errors, and things that don't make sense. Like the little zombie girl Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) encounters in the The Walking Dead's pilot episode that's apparently the only walker with the ability to run. These little mistakes are nowhere near enough to ruin the show for viewers, but people do notice them, and they're kind of fun to point out. Express recently resurfaced one such moment that a fan submitted to the Movie Mistakes message board as a so-called error.
This supposed plot hole also occurred in season 1, during the episode "Wildfire." It's not a mistake that affected the plot of the episode in a significant way. It's probably not really a mistake at all, and is actually a choice the filmmakers made to avoid devoting valuable screen time to dramatizing something unimportant. But it still stands out because it's such an obvious break in continuity that it makes you say "Wait, what just happened?"
The most notable thing about "Wildfire" is that it's the episode in which Rick, Shane (John Bernthal), and the rest of their party arrive at the CDC facility, but much of the episode is devoted to the survivors dealing with the aftermath of a walker attack that killed many members of the group. Jim (Andrew Rothenberg) has been bitten, and is slowly succumbing in the back of an RV as they travel to the CDC. Then the RV breaks down, and that leads to the plot hole.
Time-traveling Shane
A hose breaks in the engine of Dale's (Jeffrey DeMunn) RV, and the group doesn't have the supplies they need to fix it. Shane is looking through binoculars at the road ahead, and announces that he thinks he sees a gas station. He and T-Dog (IronE Singleton) say they'll go check it out and see what they can bring back, and will be back in a few minutes, while Rick goes into the RV to check on Jim. Shane and T-Dog are heard off-screen starting an engine and driving off. Jim tells Rick that he wants to be left there to die.
Then, what seems to be moments later, Rick is telling the others what Jim wants, and Shane is standing there like he never left. T-Dog is also there when they're saying goodbye to Jim. Then, they drive away. No one says anything about what Shane and T-Dog found at the gas station, and fixing the RV is not shown.
The person who submitted it to Movie Mistakes considers this a plot hole. They were thinking literally and not accounting for the filmmakers skipping a little bit through time because it wasn't narratively important to watch Dale replace a hose in his engine. But it really does feel like a plot hole because of the way the scene is edited. The cut from Rick and Jim in the RV to Rick telling his group what Jim wants is hard, instead of using a transition or a dissolve to signify that time has passed. It's more of an editing mistake than a continuity mistake, but it gives the effect of a plot hole. Obviously Shane and T-Dog came back and the RV was fixed in the time between the cut, but that could have been conveyed more clearly.