Kate and Leopold/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Horror

  • In Kate and Leopold, because the inventor of the elevator is brought to modern times using time travel, all elevators start malfunctioning and eventually disappear. One of the characters explicitly brings up that if he is not returned quickly, people will vanish that would have been his descendants. Presumably the same thing would happen to them as did happen to the elevators-first they would all start gaining more severe medical problems until eventually they all died and vanished.
    • Also, how well is Kate going to get along stuck in the 1800s? Her job is completely impossible there, so she has no way to make a living, which leaves her dependent on Leopold (in a time without much in the way of women's rights), and if their relationship should go bad...
    • Yeah, Leopold should've made that clear to her. Women of the 21st century have it way better than women of the 19th century.
    • Well, she could've been a school teacher. I know, not as glamerous and awesome as the job she had in our time (not to mention the...oh yeah...rights she had in our time), but she would at least have a job (though it wouldn't pay her well, if at all.)
  • A site discussing how the ending of the movie was depressing [dead link] lays these facts down:

The media will spin the whole thing to make it sound like Kate was psycho and her company actually attempted to hire her. Because of this, they'll suffer a severe backlash economically. And seeing as the economy tanked in 2009...

Nurse Gretchen is going to either have her medical license stripped from her or jailed for willingly letting a believed-to-be-insane patient run back out into polite society, therefore endangering both himself and others.

Leopold is MIA and, from the perspective of the NYPD if you consider all the evidence that site lays out, Leopold looks like a monster who conspired with ex-boyfriend Stuart (the aforesaid mental patient) to drive an emotionally and mentally unstabled woman to jump off of Brooklyn Bridge.

Charlie is going to have a hell of a time trying to get a job now that people know he was related to a girl who seemingly killed herself and friends with two men who seemingly drove her to kill herself.

Fridge Logic

  • How plausible is it that nobody else would've dreamed up the elevator in Leopold's absence? (In the real someone else did invent it. Modern-style safety elevators were actually fairly common in New York City by 1876.)
    • If Stuart is Leopold's grandson and Kate and Leopold wind up marrying in the 19th Century, doesn't that mean that Stuart spent two years boning his own grandmother?
    • Being from the Victorian era, shouldn't Leopold be much more sexist? And at the end when Kate goes back in time to 1876, doesn't she basically give up all human rights, being a woman and all?
      • Women had rights in the Victorian era, though not many. Women couldn't even vote yet despite the fact that the monarch was a queen.