The following article contains spoilers.The superhero genre might be the most plot-hole-prone genre in all of television. Part of that is just the nature of the beast. These shows deal with time travel, alternate realities, and constant power reveals that keep adding new layers of lore, and it gets harder to keep all of that airtight as the seasons go on. Part of it is lazy writing, like when a hero who just fought an alien warlord in the finale somehow cannot handle a street-level thug three episodes into the new season.
And part of it is plain corporate dysfunction. When the movie and TV arms of the same cinematic universe operate in separate silos, characters can end up feeling incoherent across projects. Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), for instance, spent an entire series processing her grief in WandaVision, only to show up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and process it all over again. It made no sense. In this listicle, we’re looking at some of the most glaring plot holes in your favorite superhero TV shows that end up breaking their own logic.
6
‘Moon Knight’ (2022)
Moon Knight‘s Season 1 finale revealed that there was a third personality hiding in Marc’s (Oscar Isaac) head the entire time: Jake Lockley. It was a cool reveal that comic fans had been desperately waiting for, but it starts to fall apart when you look at the events of the show more closely. Earlier in the season of the Marvel TV show, after Marc gets shot, both he and Steven end up in the afterlife, where they have to explore Marc’s traumatic past in order to balance their hearts on the scales of justice.
But the audience never sees Jake show up in the afterlife at all. Some fans point to the shaking sarcophagus in the episode as a hint that Jake was trapped there, but even that doesn’t fix the issue because he still never goes through judgment or has his heart weighed like Marc and Steven. If Jake had been part of the same mind and body, he should have been present during the judgment as well.
5
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ (2013–2020)
The early days of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. closely followed the MCU’s storylines, but as the series went on, inconsistencies started creeping in. The Darkhold shown in the series was completely different from the one later seen in Multiverse of Madness, and the way time travel worked in earlier seasons did not match what Endgame later established. But still, the series tried its best to work the overarching MCU plotlines into its stories. The team on the series helped with Age of Ultron behind the scenes by building the Helicarrier and finding Strucker (Spencer Treat Clark). The Sokovia Accords played a huge role in Season 4.
But Season 7 is where it all breaks down. Endgame showed us a post-snap world that was completely devastated, with overgrown ghost towns, and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) leading therapy sessions for survivors five years later in 2023. However, the final moments of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7, set in 2020, shows a world that’s definitely not the same one we saw in Endgame. If things were that bad in 2023, then 2020, right after half of all life just vanished, should have been catastrophic. Instead, Season 7 shows us a world where S.H.I.E.L.D. is fully rebuilt, the academy is open again, and there is no mention of anyone turning to dust. What makes it even weirder is that the show actually name-drops Thanos (Josh Brolin) and references Infinity War multiple times, but then completely ignores what happened at the end of that movie. You cannot have it both ways.
4
‘The Flash’ (2014–2023)
You can spend hours talking about the sheer number of plot holes in The Flash. The power inconsistencies alone are enough to annoy anybody. But the most frustrating plot hole comes in Season 3 with Savitar. Savitar straight-up tells Barry (Grant Gustin) that he is a future time remnant created by Barry to help fight Savitar, who was later shunned by Team Flash and ended up becoming Savitar. So logically, future Barry could just choose not to create time remnants and avoid the entire problem. Or at the very least, not treat him like an outcast.
But even if you choose to overlook that as a messy time travel paradox, the writing somehow still manages to make things worse. At one point, Team Flash realizes that since Savitar is a future version of Barry, he shares all of Barry’s memories. They even dedicate an entire episode to proving this link, where Barry loses his memories, and Savitar loses his as well. And yet, they continue to include Barry in every planning discussion as if that detail does not matter. This means Savitar automatically knows every plan they come up with. If they had just kept Barry out of certain conversations, they could have hidden Iris’ (Candice Patton) location from Savitar entirely. The show just skips past the obvious solution and keeps moving.
3
‘Loki’ (2021–2023)
Endgame established that the MCU does not follow Back to the Future time travel rules, where changing the past rewrites the future. Instead, any change in the past creates a new branching timeline, while the original timeline stays exactly the same. So, what you do in one timeline should not magically update another version of events that already exists. That falls apart in the Loki Season 2 premiere. The episode features a scene where Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is talking to O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) in the past while Mobius (Owen Wilson) is with him in the present, and as Loki tells him things, O.B. suddenly starts remembering them in real time.
This breaks the rules in two ways. First, by Endgame’s logic, Loki changing the past should create a new branch. That means the present-day O.B. standing with Mobius should not be affected at all, because he belongs to the original timeline. But even if you ignore that and assume the TVA works differently, there is another issue. If Loki already had that conversation with O.B. in the past, then from O.B.’s perspective, it has always happened. His memory should not update midway through the scene. He should have remembered it from the start. Instead, the show treats memory like it is being uploaded in real time, where O.B. is completely unaware of something, then suddenly remembers it once we see Loki say it in the past. It makes for a fun visual moment, but it contradicts time travel logic.
2
‘Secret Invasion’ (2023)
Secret Invasion reveals that James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) had been replaced by a Skrull at some point before the events of the series. The show does not give a specific date for when the swap happened, but the clues are pretty telling. When we first see the real Rhodey, he has serious difficulty walking, and he is wearing a hospital gown that looks a lot like what he had on after his injury in Civil War. The most logical conclusion is that he was replaced almost immediately after that accident.
However, if Rhodey was a Skrull all along, then the version we saw in Infinity War and Endgame was not really him. And that version does not behave like an undercover Skrull at all. When Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) died, Rhodey was genuinely devastated. It felt like the reaction of someone who had fought alongside him for years, not someone playing a role. Moreover, during the final battle in Endgame, Rhodey was injured, and he bled red human blood, whereas Skrulls bleed green. The Russos were clearly not writing those films with any knowledge of this retcon, and the result is that a reveal meant to be shocking and cool ends up creating a massive continuity problem.
1
‘Smallville’ (2001–2011)
Smallville Season 7 introduced the Veritas storyline, which was a secret society formed by the Luthors, Swanns, Queens, and Teagues to find and protect a prophesied traveler from Krypton. The show reveals that Lionel Luthor (John Glover) had actually known about Clark (Tom Welling) all along, and that Luthor and Dr. Swann (Christopher Reeve) had been close associates for years. It also reveals that the Veritas “V” emblem had been hiding in plain sight in the Luthor mansion’s stained-glass window the entire time.
The problem is that none of this holds up when you go back and watch the earlier seasons. The “V” symbol that was supposedly always there in the window does not appear in any prior season. Lionel and Dr. Swann treated each other like complete strangers when they shared scenes in Season 4, which makes no sense if they were secretly allied this whole time. And Lionel’s behavior throughout the early seasons is completely inconsistent with a man who always knew Clark was an alien. He didn’t even move back to Smallville until he lost his sight, and he did not start showing real suspicion toward Clark until the Red Kryptonite episode.
Smallville
- Release Date
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2001 – 2011
- Network
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The WB, The CW
