Pirates of the Caribbean/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • To avoid spoilers, I'm going to add this here. So, as much as I watch Dead Man's Chest, I just can't make out how Liar's Dice works. I suppose this is as a good place as any to have someone please explain it to me, and then maybe I'll figure out what happened in that scene.
    • As far as I can tell, it's a combination of craps and B.S./cheat (a card game centered around bluffing). You roll most of your dice, bet on an outcome which is preferably higher than the other peoples' bets, then go around the table and either roll your last die or reveal your dice. If you say that your dice are a different number from what you actually rolled, your opponents have the option of calling your bluff and disqualifying or penalizing you, but your call is final. Presumably, if someone calls what they think is a bluff and it turns out to be true, the caller gets penlized in some way. This means you could give up a game and take the entire pot of years of service added onto your own in order to let another person win a secondary wager they had on the game, but under normal circumstances nobody would want to.
    • The way it looked like to me was: Everyone rolls all their dice. Then, in sequence, they each look at their dice and make a guess as to how many of a given number is up out of all the dice that end up showing. From there, it's like a game of chicken: If you get the number right, you win. If you can make the other guy back off, you also win. If you make a wrong guess or a bluff and your opponent calls you on it, you lose and he wins. From the look of it, you only win or lose directly: Bootstrap Bill lost to Davey Jones, but Will didn't lose because he wasn't part of that final bet.
    • Everyone rolls their dice. Each player then takes turns making bets on how many of each dice there are, example: "Five fours." The next person ups the bet and so on until someone calls liar. The dice are shown. If the person who was called a liar is wrong, he loses. If not, his accuser loses. The game has a wikipedia page if you want more info.
      • The game is also playable in at least the DS game for At Worlds End.
  • If Davey Jones was able to come onto land by standing in a bucket of water in At World's End, why didn't Will just do that in order to see Elizabeth after he became captain of the Flying Dutchman?
    • Because he has to spend those ten years sailing the seas of the underworld, ferrying the souls of the dead to their rest. If he comes back to Earth, he's not doing his job, and Elizabeth doesn't look the type to be turned on by Tentacle Porn.
    • Sandbanks aren't really proper land.
      • That doesn't answer the question of why she didn't just meet him on a sandbank.
        • Boinking in a bathtub doesn't really seem very appealing to me. Not to mention that they could always meet each on the Dutchman. They can't meet each other because Will is really busy ferrying the souls of the dead, not because they'll explode if they see each other again.
          • You've obviously never had...how to PG13 this...a good bath. Try it some time.
            • You know, reading the above troper instantly made me think back to the Goblet of Fire movie and Cedric's line about "[it] not being a bad place for a bath-leer-"
            • See the Cracked article about having sex in water (which is a horrible lubricant, BTW). Whenever you hear the term "micro-tears" in association with genitals, one can't help but be a little put off by the idea...
              • Because he'd turn into a sea creature. Remember the only reason Jones did was because he wasn't doing his job. If Will stopped performing his duty to indulge in personal benefits, he'd begin to turn into a sea man.
              • Because Calypso was a no-show. She was pretty much the reason he took the job in the first place, and if she wasn't gonna stick around, why bother?
              • Heh, sea man...
              • The deal was that they both had to play a part. Will/Jones had to ferry souls for 10 years, while Elizabeth/Calypso had to stay faithful for 10 years. Elizabeth did, while Calypso didn't. Jones actually did ferry the souls for the first 10 years.
      • Speaking of whihc, what kind of arrangement is that? The dutchman needs a captain, so there will always be one. But if he has a girldfriend, she has to sit on a rick and wait for him for ten years at a time or he'll be justified in ignoring his duties and turning into a monster??
        • It's also a setup to fail. The Dutchman's captain is immortal. Except in one particular case (when the girlfriend is really a goddess that's slumming it), the girlfriend isn't. I figure you only get about four or five iterations before the deal fails because the girlfriend is dead of old age. Then what?
        • "Tell me, Elizabeth Turner, do you fear death?"
        • According to Word of God, there's a bit of dialogue that got left out of At World's End which clarifies that if the girlfriend is faithful, the captain has the option of leaving the ship and becoming a mortal man again. It's only if she lets him down that he's stuck on the ship until somebody else volunteers to take over, and in that case it no longer matters whether she dies of old age.
          • Which probably means that Will turned the captaincy of the Flying Dutchman over to his father, who didn't have anyone waiting for him and could therefore sail the seas as long as he wanted with a light hea-... light place where his heart used to be.
  • The first film was way better than the second two, but was anyone else bothered by how both sides effectively wanted the curse to end? If it wasn't for the whole "and we will kill you once we get your blood" the heroes wouldn't have been motivated to stop them, actually they would have been motivated to help, since the whole world would be much better off with them mortal.
    • As hospitable as Barbossa was, he did still have the unfortunate habit of kidnapping people, which made it very difficult for the love-parrots to want to help him. Plus, he kept saying he'd kill everyone when it was all over.
    • And it was kinda implied (as implied as it gets in a Disney film) that they were going to rape Elizabeth after they got what they wanted.
    • Why would the protagonists and the antagonists having the same objective bother anybody? Just because you don't see it all the time in movies doesn't mean it's a head-scratcher. Also, it was a historically fallacious Disney movie based on a themepark ride that broke the laws of physics like they were pickle chips, featuring cursed skeleton pirates. And the problem you have with the logic was that the antagonist's objective in and of itself was benign?
    • Also, keep in mind that while all sides want the curse to end, they also have other, mutually exclusive goals- Will/Elizabeth each want to rescue the other from Barbossa at varying points; Norrington wants to capture Barbossa and his crew, curse or no curse (and keep in mind that he doesn't even seem to believe there is a curse until he sees the skeleton pirates with his own eyes); Barbossa, by the climax, wants to stay immortal long enough to kill Norrington and his crew and then lift it and get away scott-free with all his loot; Jack just wants his ship back and revenge on Barbossa. The movie builds up plenty of reasons for everybody to fight by the end of it.
    • In addition, might I point out that it's not the ends that are important when it comes to Barbossa'a goals, it's the means that sets the protagonists into motion. In order to lift the curse, he needed both the coinage and the blood offering of William Turner Sr. That means the blood of his only child and the coin said child inherited, which gets Elizabeth and Will abducted, Swann wants his daughter safe, Norrington wants that and the pirates hanged, and Jack just wants his ship back. Lifting the curse isn't really the goal of any of the protagonists.
      • At the same time, though, the protagonists have plenty of reason to want the curse to be lifted so the badguy pirates stop being invincible and impossible to kill. It may not be their goal, per se, but there's really no reason for them to be against it.
    • Not all the characters are aware of all of the facts, so they act on incomplete information. Will and Norrington don't find out about the curse or how to lift it until later in the film. Barbossa doesn't know whose blood they need until Jack tells him. Neither Norrington nor Will trust Jack Sparrow. The character's actions in the first film actually make perfect sense when you consider what they want and what they know:
      • Will wants to save Elizabeth no matter the cost.
      • Norrington wants to save Elizabeth and to uphold the law.
      • Jack wants the Black Pearl.
      • Barbossa and the pirates want to lift the curse.
  • In Dead Man's Chest, why would the Kraken follow Sparrow's hat? Shouldn't it be searching for the Black Spot?
    • Uh, no. It was following the Black Pearl. The hat (and the ship it was picked up by) happened to be in the way.
      • I concur. The ship was in the way and the Kraken was hungry. Also, lets not forget the Kraken is tracking Sparrow BY MAGIC. Who knows how that works? When the hat became separated from Sparrow it may have put two blips on the Kraken's magic radar.
        • To be fair, Sparrow's ship was also part of the deal with Jones. Jones raised the Pearl so that Sparrow could captain it again. Therefore, the Kraken might have been charged with taking back both Sparrow and the Pearl as it does.
        • I do believe that the Black Mark would only enable the Kraken to track Jack if he, or any possesion he had on himself at the time when the Black Mark was laid upon him, comes into contact with the Ocean. Hence, the hat attack.
        • One possibility could be that one of the identifiers, of several, was "Captain of the Black Pearl," and the hat was an outward mark of the captain. Other identifiers could have been "answers by the name of Jack Sparrow," "has traces of being cured of the Aztec zombie curse," and "has a Black Spot curse mark."
        • The hat is a symbol of position. The ship is a fairly transitory thing, having been stolen from Jack... how many times in three movies? He's really bad at holding on to that thing... The hat, however, is one thing which he constantly holds on to, because it's his symbol of power. And because it's his symbol of power, and because it's such a direct tie to him, to a supernatural tracker that's very important. More important than the ship, and quite likely to throw the trail off because it is so strongly assumed, down to being almost a rule of the universe, that Jack's hat will be where Jack is. It's all to do with magic. And sea turtles, mate. Somehow.
        • It's gotta be a bloodhound kinda thing. The Kraken is hunting for Jack because he's sentenced to the black spot, not because the black spot is what's attracting It, (notice It went after Will in particular on two occasions, somehow finding him in the middle of the ocean the first time, even though Will didn't have the Black Spot?) but anything of Jack's might distract It's senses.
        • The reasons it went after Will are completely unrelated. At the time, Jones had (temporarily) removed the Black Spot from Jack, so he was no longer being hunted by the beast. The Kraken went after Will, though, because Jones intentionally called it (using the giant hammer-like device on the Flying Dutchman) to destroy the ship he (correctly) suspected Will was aboard. And the reason for that was to get back the Key to the Dead Man's Chest.
    • What has been overlooked by some of the previous tropers is Jack's BO. What's easier to smell out? An individual, wooden ship...like most others on the ocean, or the pirate guy who rarely bathes?
    • Don't be silly. Jack's hat is part of him, so much so that it is indistinguishable from Jack himself.
  • In "At World's End" why on earth does the crew cut out Will's heart? Didn't Davey Jones do this because of how he felt about Calypso? It is in no way implied that this is a requisite to becoming captain of the dutchman, so why did it happen?
    • But wasn't it a requisite? Anyway, that big stab wound in it wasn't doing him any good.
    • I understood it to be a requisite - the heart must be removed, but Davy Jonnes chose to keep his on an island where he couldn't get at it so that he could divorce himself from his emotions. Or something...
      • But now Elizabeth's hanging on to the chest. So is he still emotionless or what?
        • The place the heart is kept is mostly symbolic. Davy Jones wanted to separate himself from his emotions, so he put it somewhere he could only get once every ten years. Will however, loved Elizabeth, so he let her guard his heart, to symbolise their marriage/love.
    • We could just blame the crew's ignorance... As long as they knew Jones, they knew him to be without his heart. They assumed there was a need to relinquish the unneeded flesh. Organ. (Organ? * chuckles* ) Muscle. Whatever. Savvy?
        • Listen up, people: The curse that binds the next captain after Jones is not the same as the power that made Jones captain. Jones cursed himself, not to mention his ship and his crew, by cutting his heart out and making himself a supernatural monster. Didn't it occur to anyone that he might also curse anyone who managed to murder him and end his rein of cruelty? Maybe into taking his place and possibly continuing his rein? Call it the Wolfram & Heart gambit.
      • This troper saw the heart thing as no, the captain of the dutchman did NOT require his heart to be cut out, that was a Davey Jones thing. However, Will personally needed his heart to be cut out because otherwise he would die. The ship needs a captain, Will needs to live, whatever the hell law governs the heartbox allows for Will to live, PROVIDED HIS HEART GOES IN THE BOX.
    • This Troper decided that the Heart was a requisite for heading a ship of the dead. Jones became all Squiddy because, as Claypso stated "He corrupted his purpose and so became himself corrupted." Will on the other hand, stayed normal looking because he did his job right, sacrificed his love for ten years, and gave his heart up so that he could ferry the dead.
      • It's possible Calypso is simply twisting the story she tells a bit to make Jones seem less sympathetic. It's clear that the whole 'seperate from emotions' thing is a symbolic gesture. Jones is a raging asshole because he wants to be one, it's how he feels better after Calypso's betrayed him. When he took the job, loosing his heart probably didn't matter much because he had taken the job as a favor to the woman he loved. Afterward, there's a certain amount of masochism in it. It's "since I hate everything and am going to spend every waking moment being the most miserly wretch I can possibly be, how awesome is it that I literally have no heart?"
    • This Troper just delegated it to Ass Pull or Retcon status. There is nothing alluding to the chest being part of the original deal until the third movie, at which point they almost completely and immediately abandoned the concept they'd thrown around for all of Dead Man's Chest, not in a "oh, so that's what happened" manner, but as if the prior explanations had never occured. It doesn't help matters that suddenly this new story was apparently not much of a secret, seeing how Elizabeth's Father overheard Beckett's crew talking about it, delegating the new story rather neatly to the status the former tale had. And while yes Beckett did have Jones' leash at that point, that's not the kind of thing you'd expect Davy or anyone loyal to him to let slip under any circumstances. To This Troper, it seemed apparent that the story changed between movies.
    • My understanding is that the rules were fairly loose when Jones became Captain of the Dutchman. There weren't any rules in place for a successor to Jones' position when Calypso swore him to it, and so the rules developed around Jones. Thus, Jones cutting his own heart out was not part of the job, but something he did on his own accord. Will, however, had to have his heart cut out because Jones established the precedent. In short, it was less "Here are the established rules for Will to become Captain of the Dutchman" and more "Will has to become Davy Jones 2: Electric Boogaloo".
    • And this troper assumed that, with Will unconscious and unable to say he's claiming the Flying Dutchman for himself, replacing Jones's heart with his was the only sure way to make certain the captaincy devolved to him, not Jack. It was Jack's muscle-power that drove the blade into Jones's heart, after all, even if he used Will's hand as a tool with which to grip the hilt; until Bootstrap Bill re-enacted Jones's heart-extraction ritual, either one of them had a valid claim to be the new captain.
    • This is explained in a deleted scene: Jones cursed his heart after cutting it out that his slayer must do the same with his own heart. Because stabbing the heart is the only way to kill Jones, his killer must also replace him. So the heart thing is a side effect of being called to be Captain of the Flying Dutchman
  • Another "At World's End" question: What keeps Will and Elizabeth from meeting at sea? They're both captains of their own ships, after all; and you'd think, given the way the supernatural works in the films, the Pirate King would have some reason to um, "consult" with the captain of the Dutchman. Was he not allowed to leave the ship, period, or allow the living to board, even temporarily? Or did the writers just really want to screw them over?
    • I'm pretty sure Will is trying to do the job correctly, which means he's actually going to have to ferry the souls of the dead. I'm not sure if Elizabeth would be able to reach the Underworld again (at least, not without the whole dying thing).
    • For that matter, wouldn't it make sense for Elizabeth to just go get herself killed at sea? Then it would be pretty much "Do you fear death, Elizabeth Turner?" "Heck yes. Now let's make out."
      • Of course, Elizabeth isn't all that suicidal, and by the time she could think of this tactic, she's pregnant. Which would put a damper on any plans to get herself killed at sea to be with Will- would YOU orphan your own child that way?
      • It's implied that Davy Jones isn't supposed to do the whole "Do you fear death?" thing. That's how he got cursed with looking like Cthulhu, he wasn't ferrying the souls of the dead, he was just using fear to build an army navy (we don't do that "water thing") of undead sailors.
        • Actually, it's never implied that Davy Jones isn't supposed to be doing this, this is a legitimate way for him to get crew members. The reason he looks like Cthulhu is because he isn't guiding the souls of the dead who are killed at sea. I had the exact same reaction as the above troper.
          • The phrasing of "Do you fear death" makes me think that it may have even started with some of the souls wanting to join the crew rather than pass on immediately. It serves two purposes: the Dutchman has a crew, and those who genuinely fear death can make an easier transition. The problem, IMO, wasn't that Jones was recruiting a crew, it was that he was completely ignoring all the souls that didn't join him, while keeping his crew bound to him long after they were ready to pass on.
        • That is exactly the point. Ferrying souls means no crew, EVERYONE goes on to the locker. Calypso never said he'd have a crew, just a ship. Those fish-men were also killed at sea, duh! (NVM that half the time, Jones was the one killing them.)
          • So, he's supposed to sail the entire ship by himself? What about the fact that Will keeps his dad on the crew in the end? He's committed to doing the job right.
          • Actually, the above above poster unwittingly hit the nail on the head : the problem isn't that Davy gets his crew by sidetracking dead sailors on their way to the Locker, but that he actively kills people at sea just so that he can do his "Do you fear death" schtick and get more sailors.
      • No, the problem is that he ISN'T DOING HIS JOB. Ok, the dead sailors aren't exactly helping that, but it's not the main issue. Also, he's not killing sailors/kidnapping dead sailors so that they can join his crew, as some tropers seem to think, but he's killing sailors OR letting them join his crew, weren't you paying attention? After Davey accepts Will into his crew, he gets asked about the other survivors, to which he says that there were none, signalling to the crew to KILL THE SAILORS. You can't kill something that's already dead!
        • Much as the US Military hates it, the truth is at "army", used generically, can mean simply "a large group of soldiers". Contrariwise, "navy" specifically means "a large group of ships", which is clearly not the case. You can say with great accuracy that Davy Jones is building an "army of sailors" or even an "army of marines", but it would be even more accurate, not to mention more succinct, to just say he is building a "crew".
        • Back to the point, Will had to do the job or turn into a monster like Jones. Elizabeth is alive and can't go/survive where the Dutchman and it's crew can, so them docking someplace safe so she could be aboard during the ten year work-week would take Will away from his mission. He did the job right, and combined with the fact that Elizabeth waited faithfully for him to return, they broke the curse and she got him back for good. Doing anything risky or crazy (like Elizabeth killing herself just to see him or expecting some kind on on-board vacation) would've screwed them out of their happy ending.
      • Also, Will was only going to be helming the Dutchman for 10 years. Sure, Elizabeth could kill herself and they have ten years at sea together, but what happens after that? She moves on to the afterlife, and he goes back to being mortal. Waiting ten years meant they had the whole rest of their lives after that to be together.
        • About that. Will captains the Dutchman for ten years, leaves... and then what? The Dutchman must have a captain.
        • Where is this "Will is captain for ten years and then is mortal again" idea coming from? As I understand it, he's bound by the same "ten years at sea, one day on land, repeat" as Jones was, not "ten years at sea, the rest of your mortal existence wherever you want." Having his heart in the chest is the only thing keeping him alive, if the Captain of the Flying Dutchman can really be considered alive, anyway.
        • Word of God says that the only reason Davy Jones was bound to the ship forever is that Calypso didn't stay faithful to him and meet him on their one day. Since Elizabeth did, Will's free after the ten years.
        • What was your source? The conversation between Jones and Calypso in the Pearl's brig reveals that Jones did his job properly for ten years. When he returned for his day with Calypso, she did not show up. From there it would appear that Jones discontinued ferrying souls out of anger. The failure to continue his job properly led to Jones' and his crew's evolution into sea creatures. Nowhere is it implied that the job lasts only ten years; it goes on until the captain can no longer serve (until his heart is destroyed). At that point, a new captain takes over, going through the same heart-carving ritual. Once Will took over, the crew became human again, since a new captain resets the curse. He will ferry souls for ten years, come on land for a day, and repeat as long as his heart stays beating. Will was never freed from his duty, nor is it even possible, since he would have to become a mortal without a heart, which biologically just does not work.
      • So Will elects a sucessor. Just because HE got the job as a method of not dying, doesn't mean that once he's gone the ship can't function like this troper would imagine any other ship to do, that is, when the captain wants to leave, the first mate takes over, or something.
        • The way this troper read it was that the "Only one day on land" clause is broken by faithful love. Now, Will can come to and fro the Dutchman as he pleases, visiting his son and Elizabeth when he's not ferrying the dead.
        • This troper read it as a two-part clause, the captain (Will) cannot set foot on land, his love (Liz) cannot set foot on the sea. It actually helps to explain why Calypso wasn't at the predetermined place when Jones went to see her, as she's a sea goddess and would thus ignore her part in the clause.
        • What about the end of their last scene? Will leaves her his heart, she nearly kisses him, then runs up and does kiss him as he's walking away. Then she's standing on the beach, alone, as the ship sails away. Seems like he had to stay on the ship to me.
  • In the later movies. The pirates are defenders of freedom because the East India Company's desire to rule the seas is just wrong. No man deserves to try and control the sea, it's true ... don't you agree, Calypso?
    • Ah, hypocrocy and self-preservation. The noblest of pirate traditions.
      • It's not hypocrisy to realize your mistake and try to fix it. Barbossa lays it out at the meeting, the first brethren court made a mistake in binding Calypso, which led to Cutler Beckett and his ilk.
    • Defenders of their freedom, really. I have no idea where Calypso fits into anything.
    • She rules the seas, of course. It's explicitly stated that the first Brethren Court bound her "so men could rule the seas".
      • Also, the EITC are like the Borg and Wal-Mart combined. You will be assimilated, but at the lowest prices!
      • You're being too literal, and overlooking some pretty basic differences. 1) Calypso is not a mortal, or a company, or any of those other things... she's a goddess. It's part of the natural order for her to have dominion over the seas, and her "dominion" basically extends to whipping up storms, causing odd occurrences, and making the seas more treacherous... but in ways that we would consider natural. 2) The pirates bound her into mortal form so that they could "rule" the seas... "rule" here having a meaning of "sail around doing what we want with much less chance of being sucked into a random whirlpool or pelted with unseasonal hailstorms".
  • On a slightly less sarcastic note, at the end of At World's End, the pirates fight for their freedom against those dastardly English chaps from the East India blah blah etcetera. For freedom! And democracy! And the right to murder and steal and rape and pillage and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Yes, these are the quintessential Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, but still.
    • Actually, historical pirates did have some of that going on. A lot of the pirate subculture wasn't just about pillage and plunder, but also escaping the social conventions and power structures of the great empires. Pirate ships- independently operated ones, anyways, as opposed to privateers and well-organized corporate pirates (yes, such things existed) often had a democratically elected captain, shared booty and followed compacts ratified by the crew, and sometimes even liberated slaves because the slaves weren't of any value to them.
      • Yep, minorities, people of mixed race, women and escaped slaves often took up piracy. The only way to be judged by the strength of their back instead of by their race/gender/monetary value.
  • By the end of the series, on thing is true: Barbossa needs to get over himself. Jack is so damn clever. Why won't he just build a fleet with him?! I think Barbossa hates Jack so much because Jack is sort of like a pirate White Prince compared to him: (1) His father's already a powerful pirate, (2) Jack's spoiled and probably didn't start out by the "sweat of his brow" and all that and (3) Jack got a top rate ship for nothing while Barbossa lost everything he had in Europe and had to start again in the Caribbean. Barbossa needs a hug. :)
    • Jack's father helped him, he didn't work for anything, and he got a ship for nothing? He sold his soul to an immortal demigod for his ship, found the compass himself, and then tricked his way out of the deal! That's not hard work? Granted, Barbossa still ought to give it up, simply because he'll never eat Jack's natural luck it seems.
    • Then again, Jack isn't exactly the most... dependable guy. Would you keep him as your second-in-command ? Or, Crystal Dragon Jesus forbid, as your commander ? And of course, should they even agree on a you-command-these-guys, I-get-those-guys deal, there's the whole "Who gets to sail the Pearl ?" thing.
    • Jack and his father don't seem to get along much. In fact, Papa Sparrow seems to generally hate everybody. The idea that Jack is the pirate equivalent of a spoiled rich kid doesn't add up. If that were so, he'd be able to get another ship when Barbossa mutinied, or get his father to evict Barbossa.
      • That's Jack's older brother.
      • No, no it's not. Captain Teague is explicitly Sparrow's father.
        • Okay, let's deal with this for a minute: #1, Yes, Barbossa clearly needs to get over himself, but in COTBP, Barbossa was willing to work with Jack at the end of the movie, and look what happened? He got shot in his chest! #2, Teague doesn't necessarily hate everyone, he's probably just a hard-ass Rules Nazi, (it is his job) and he seems to get along better with Jack than anyone else. #3 Teague is Jack's father, but it's not explicitly stated anywhere in the film. Personal thoughts: I also jumped to the conclusion that Jack's the pirate version of a White Prince, and is thus roundly disdained by other pirates, but he's in a scary and dangerous profession -- one mustn't assume Teague wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. EDIT: Also had to add, about the Teague and Jack thing, notice the different last names? There's a chance Jack pulled a Nick Cage, there. Trying to make a name for yourself isn't easy when you're dad's a legend.
        • Jack directly refers to Teague as "Dad" in the fourth film.
    • We also saw what happens at the start of the second movie when Jack gets his own ship: he's aimless, obtuse, won't explain himself to his crew and doesn't seem very concerned about their well being or opinions. He's a brilliant adventurer and pirate, but he's not a very good leader. Barbossa might have had some good reasons for leading a mutiny against him, since he does seem to be much better at actually commanding his crew. At least the second time around, Barbossa respected Jack enough to simply strand him at port, rather than on a deserted island.
      • You're overlooking the fact that Jack's only 'aimless' because his compass isn't working, so they don't have anywhere to go. Considering what happened with Barbossa, isn't it plausible that Jack didn't want to admit that he couldn't find the destination, in case the crew decided to replace him with someone who did?
      • The compass wouldn't work because Jack was aimless, not the other way around. It pointed towards his heart's desire, but he couldn't make up his mind on where he wanted to go. It's no insult to Jack to say that the very qualities that make him a brilliant adventurer also make him a bad leader. Davy Jones says as much when he responds to the news of the Black Pearl's mutiny with "then you were a poor captain, but a captain nonetheless".
  • Back in the first movie, Elizabeth took the medallion off of Will and kept it for eight years. Why didn't she turn into a skeleton under the full moon like everyone else?
    • You are only cursed if you take the gold directly from the chest. If possessing one of the coins was enough, Will would have been cursed, too. As would anyone who accepted one as payment.
    • My problem with that theory is that the curse seems to be because the gold was * stolen* overall. So really, once Elizabeth stole the medallion from Will (who had been sent it, and who had not stolen it himself), she should have fallen under the curse. But likely it really does depend on where you grabbed it from.
    • I was under the impression that if you took the gold, you were cursed to return as a skeleton thing once you died/received a fatal wound. Then, when the curse was lifted, you became properly alive until you were killed. This explains why Elizabeth and Will aren't skeletons, but it doesn't explain why the monkey remains undead.
    • The monkey didn't remain undead, it became undead again. In the stinger at the end of Curse Of The Black Pearl, Jack the Monkey takes another coin from the chest.
    • Where did it say you only became a skeleton thing if you died? It's a bit unreasonable to assume that all the pirates have received fatal wounds in 10 years. There were other indications that they were cursed, Barbossa said that food turned to ash in their mouths and other things, which, incidentally, hardly sound like the afliction of a skeleton. The skeletalness was only part of the curse, and a handy visual indication.
      • Indeed, Jack the monkey transforms immediately after filching a coin from the chest the second time.
    • I thought the curse would only affect you if you stole the gold out of greed, rather than obtaining it in "good faith" (to use a legal term.) The pirates certainly stole it out of greed, which Jack would have done, too, had he been there; by contrast, little Elizabeth took one to examine it, make sure no one thought little Will was a pirate - and then kept it because she got interrupted on the ship, or loved and wanted to remember Will, etc. Similarly, everyone who sold the pirates food or whatever and accepted those coins in payment was not part of the original greed/stealing; they were good faith recipients - hence no undead Elizabeth and no random undead merchants who happened to get paid by the pirates roaming around random ports.
    • Barbossa explicitly states, and I quote "Any mortal that removes but a single piece from that stone chest shall be punished for eternity." It's the act of taking the gold directly from the chest, case closed.
  • Why is it that all the medallions managed to stay intact? I'm sure plenty of people would have been willing to melt them down - after all, it's not like they're legal tender.
    • Maybe it's like the One Ring and can't be melted down or destroyed.
    • Also, back in the old days, gold was gold. As long as it weighed enough and was real gold, it didn't matter who's face, or skull, was stamped on it.
      • But why wouldn't they cut them in half or quarters the better to spend them? They just kept getting absurd amounts of change every time they purchased something worth less than a medallion?
        • They probably traded whole medallions for money exclusively, then used that money to purchase whatever else they wanted. Same with everybody else who got one.
    • No reason to. A huge gold medallion with a fancy engraving on it is more valuable than a melted down lump.
    • I think they would have probably been cut up into pieces rather than melted, but then again, they are magic gold pieces that turn men into undead skeletons. Who is to say they don't have a protective charm over them to make them Nigh Invulnerable?
    • Who says that all the medallions did remain intact? There could've been broken-up pieces of medallions in the chest, that'd slipped down to the bottom because they were smaller than the whole ones. The pirates might even have re-cast some medallions from ones that were converted into gold jewelry and goblets and so on.
  • What in the hell would have happened if Davy Jones stabbed his own heart?
    • The simplest solution is just to have him suffer the fate of everybody else who stabs the heart - he becomes the captain of the 'Flying Dutchman'. Of course, as he's already the captain, this would produce no real change in his situation. Which would explain why he never bothered trying.
  • If both Jack Sparrow and Barbosa are pirate lords, why is Barbosa Sparrow's second in command? Shouldn't he have his own pirates, and not have to bother Sparrow?
    • It's safe to assume that Barbossa only became a pirate lord after the mutiny mentioned in the first movie. He had something like ten years to do it.
    • He was also an unkillable undead dude, as was his crew. I imagine he wouldn't find it difficult to kill another Pirate Lord and nab one of the pieces of eight. And Jack is Jack, if he didn't have one before he was marooned I'm sure he would have picked one up somewhere.
    • Barbossa was Pirate Lord of the Caspian Sea, where there's no other water sources leading into it and therefore not too many ships passing through, if any at all, so he probably just said "Screw this" one day and decided that he was better off as a first mate in one of the busiest seas in the world than a captain of an unpopulated water hole, assuming there were any other pirates, of course.
      • Actually, I think you might have to be a captain to be a pirate lord, but that's according to the highly suspect DVD extras, that I'm guessing have little to do with the writer's intentions.
    • I thought it was the Piece of Eight that made one a Pirate Lord. He had to be given the Piece of Eight by a former Pirate Lord, so when he did get it, he became that Pirate Lord. The Piece of Eight is proof of lordship is the Piece of Eight, as Barbossa says when the Brethren Court meets: "Prove your lordship and right to be heard."
  • Why doesn't Pintel bleed when shot by Barbossa in the first movie? We know that gunshot wounds bleed from Jack's killing of Barbossa, and we know that even when cursed the pirates bleed when wounded (not in the moonlight, of course) from when Elizabeth stabs Barbossa.
    • I'm pretty sure that they're essentially undead even in normal form. They HAVE blood but it doesn't really circulate. I'm assuming that their hearts just don't pump, and none of the their other biological functions are really working either. Barbossa didn't really BLEED, but even if your heart isn't pumping blood, if you stick the knife directly into the body it's going to come out bloody. Then, when Will broke the curse, Barbossa's heart started pumping again. My other assumption is that stepping into the moonlight and out of it essentially repairs your body-I'm assuming that Barbossa would have been fine after being shot if he'd had time to jump into the moonlight first.
      • Them being able to bleed was written in on purpose, (I think by Ted & Terry) so the pirates could pay their blood debt to the gods and it would make sense.
  • Oh, man, don't get me started. How about the first movie, when Will kills his own father. Did you realize that? Let's work this out: ten years ago the pirates all took the gold and got cursed. I can only assume that Bootstrap Bill was also cursed, as the countermeasure requires his blood, and presumably it needs the blood of every cursed person. (As opposed to the-blood-of-everybody-that-was-cursed-and-also-everybody-else-that-happened-to-work-on-the-same-boat.) So Bootstrap was cursed along with the rest of them. Now, they tell us that Bootstrap was chained to a cannon and dumped into the ocean, but he's cursed, therefore he can't die. So, for the last ten years, Bootstrap Bill has been sitting around at the bottom of the ocean, dealing with incredible boredom but nevertheless still living. Then, when Will puts the last piece in the chest, the curse is lifted, which means that Bootstrap can die now, which means he suddenly suffocates at the bottom of the ocean. And no one figures this out. No one.
    • Will actually did figure that out. There's a deleted scene from DMC, included on the Blu-Ray set, where Will tells Bootstrap he'd thought he'd killed his father when he broke the curse. And that he believed Bootstrap would prefer that to being permanently trapped at the bottom of the sea (not an unreasonable assumption.)
    • Because by then he's been recruited by Darth Squid.
      • Well sure he gets recruited, but that doesn't change the fact that he was killed in the first place. (I mean, I presume you have to be dead or near-dead in order to join the Flying Dutchman. That seems to be the deal. And Bootstap couldn't have been either of those things until the curse was lifted.) And in film #1 we didn't even know about Darth Squid, so somebody should've been like "Wait, won't Bootstrap die if we lift the curse?"
        • Yeeeees, that is what we call a mercy kill.
          • Indeed. What part of "trapped in the crushing, lightless depths of the sea for his entire immortality" implies that death would be a bad thing?
      • This troper always sorta figured that Bootstrap bartered his soul to Jones in exchange for freeing him from the cannon.
        • More to the point, Bootstrap explicitly tells Will this aboard the Dutchman. He didn't wait the full ten years to die, Jones came to him sometime in the middle there, and sailing with Jones was a better option than maybe-eternity in the crushing depths.
    • But Will had no way of knowing whether or not Davey Jones had rescued his father. As far as he knew, his immortal father was trapped in the ocean depths, and Will chose a path that would result in his father's death. Out of story, I heard that when the writers were coming up with the plot for the second movie, they noticed the giant plot hole in the first and quickly filled it in before anyone noticed. Not that it worked.
      • Will had no way of rescuing his father at all. It's not like thay had submarines, and Bill mentions the crushing depths, so it's unlikely Will could swim down. How you have saved him? Like sombody else said, mercy kill. He was stuck in a Fate Worse Than Death.
        • More to the point, did Will even know his father was an undead zombie skeleton? I mean, he didn't even know he was a pirate. It stands to reason that Will would think his father was just plain ol' dead.
          • He probably did know, or at least suspected so. After all, he knew they needed his blood, meaning someone related to him had removed at least one medallion from the chest (since he himself hadn't), and he knew (from Jack) that his father was a pirate.
    • In the first movie, Barbossa mentions that Bootstrap didn't like the idea of taking the gold. I was under the impression that this meant Bootstrap was never cursed, and was killed very shortly after his cannonball run.
      • Watch it again. It was the mutiny against Jack that Bootstrap objected to, not taking the gold.
      • If it was the mutiny then maybe he still wasn't cursed. Didn't they find the treasure after the mutiny?
      • If he wasn't cursed, they wouldn't have needed Will in the first place. He was definitely cursed.
      • They mutinied after Jack gave up the location of the treasure. Bootstrap might have objected then, but not ardently enough for them to take it out on him. It wasn't until Bootstrap deliberately took one of the gold pieces and sent it to his son, basically condemning them to the curse, that they got pissed and tossed him over board.
    • This troper was immediately convinced that Bootstrap survived the first film after seeing it. Think about it: given that he is immortal, there is no way of permanently binding him to the cannon. If you take Pintel's account literally, and say that the cannon was just bound to his feet, he would have freed himself in a day; a week at most. If Pintel was just being witty and they in fact tied his entire body down, his escape would be hindered, but by no means halted (I have this hilarious image of him rolling himself to shore). Ten years gives you a lot of time to break out of your bonds, especially if you can find a sharp rock on the ocean floor. Chains would have been the greatest hindrance, but ten years is sufficient time for them to rust enough to be broken out of, especially by somebody who never gets tired. Plus there's the fact that if the moonlight ever reaches him, he loses half his body mass and slips free, and spends the next ten years walking on the ocean floor (as is demonstrated to be possible) until he finds land. I'm still convinced that he could have done this, if he had thought ahead a bit before Davy Jones approached him.
      • Moonlight would probably never get to him, if he was deep enough. There are some parts of the ocean so deep that there is no sun or moonlight(hence luminous fish and such).
      • You forgot the water pressure. Metal submarines, if built improperly, implode at certain depths, and Bill mentioned crushing depths, so we can assume he was deep enough to experience real water pressure. It'd be like being sealed in a casket. Even if he could move, he could've been in a steep pit or something. Presumably he was thrown in the middle of the ocean, and not on the shore.
      • 1) Water pressure is no issue here. Submarines only implode if they are filled with air, if they were filled with water, they wouldn't. Fish don't, for that matter, because the water in their bodies can't be compressed. A human is subject to implosion, if his lungs were filled with air (which Bootstrap doesn't rely on), still there would be absolutely no force pressing him to the cannon. 2) Pits won't stop him. He should be able to swim during the day, and find some place to sit during the night.
      • Ever tried to figure out which way is up, never mind North/South/East/West, when you're underwater? It's hard. Scuba divers can determine which way up is by following bubbles, but Bootstrap would've voided all his air on the way down. Unless they dumped him in fairly shallow water, there'd be no light to guide him; even if he broke free and tried to reach the surface, he'd get disorientated as soon as his feet lost contact with the seabed. Or, if he tried to hoof it, at best he'd have untold miles of trackless, pitch-black mud flats to trudge across, wandering in circles no doubt.
        • First of all, the real issue in Will looking for him was, where the hell would he look? It's not like "the crushing black oblivion" was mapped by On Star. Secondly, Bill said he was "unable to move" down there, so let's say he was chained down, and really not able to get loose. We're just assuming he wasn't a skeleton when he was bound. If he was, they could've bound him by his bones, but as soon as he slipped into the pitch black and was no longer touched by moonlight, he'd be bound through his body. Icky thought. Also, as far as "Did Bill have to be dead to attract Jones," not only is that not the way Jones plays it, they actually address this in the screenplay. When Bill says he'd take "even the tiniest hope of escaping this fate" of being crushed under the weight of the ocean, unable to move or die, Jack says that it was the kind of thinking "bound to catch his attention," which Bill confirms, suggesting Jones is somehow attracted to his ideal victims. But not in a gay way. * lol*
          • They couldn't have "bound him by his bones" as you put it. Pintel explicitly says that it wasn't until after they tossed him overboard that they found out about the curse.
          • It wasn't until after they tossed him overboard that they found out about breaking the curse.
            • Not true. Pintel specifically says "'Course it wasn't until afterwards [i.e. after they tossed Bootstrap overboard] that we learned about the curse."
          • No, he says it wasn't til afterward that they learned they needed his blood to break the curse:

Pintel: It was only after that we found out that it was Bootstrap's blood we needed to lift the curse.
Ragetti: I guess that's what you call ironic.

          • How bout Will clearly never met his father and had less than no relationship with him. I'm trying to save a major hottie from undead pirates my long lost never met father doesn't even cross my mind later in hindsight.
    • 'K, weighing in. This is from the script for DMC, Will: "I lifted the curse you were under... knowing it would mean your death. But, at least, you would no longer suffer the fate handed to you by Barbossa." Also, in different versions of the COTBP script, Pintel's "Crushing black oblivion" story gets these reactions: *The Crew all look a bit sick at the idea of it.* *Will reacts with shock at the account of his father's fate.* Sounds like they got the picture. Addressing the above, "Out of story, I heard that when the writers were coming up with the plot for the second movie, they noticed the giant plot hole in the first and quickly filled it in before anyone noticed. Not that it worked." Pintel never says they killed Bootstrap, and if they could, (or thought they could) why sink him to the crushing depths tied to a cannon for damning them? That's REALLY suspicious. The writers knew what they were doing.
    • If it makes you feel better, there was never any chance of Bootstrap suffocating to death at the bottom of the ocean after Will lifted the curse. :) The "crushing depths" part ensures his body wouldn't survive nearly long enough for asphyxiation to become an issue; the weight of the ocean would have killed him by pressure alone well before!
  • Chow-Yun Fat being hired to act in a movie and then not giving him a single fight scene - and making him a coward and rapist, to boot. And then he dies from shrapnel!
    • Yeah, but ask him how much fun he had finally playing a villain! He did have a fight scene, he was just in a crowd at the time. Also, he wasn't a coward, don't know where you got that from.
      • Elizabeth calls him on it, remember? And she was right.
        • Okay, this isn't really a head-scratcher, but whatever. Sao Feng's practical and self-interested, just like Jack. Elizabeth called them both cowards for the same reason -- neither seemed to care much for loyalty/honor, and both were willing to watch countless people die from a safe distance. And Sao Feng wasn't necessarily a rapist. He just stole a kiss, we never seem him go further than that at any time. Would he if not for being stopped by act of god? Maybe. But it's a big label to slap on someone for a kiss. Hell, Elizabeth stole a kiss from Jack.
  • The entire third film. They were obviously making it up as they went along, something to do with the fuck-stupid deadline they were working under. They even admitted it in several interviews, that they had written scenes ten minutes before shooting.
    • Your Mileage May Vary, dude. This troper thinks the third film made as much sense as the first and a lot more than the second. Just because they were writing scenes on the spot and didn't have the time to complete the script before shooting doesn't man they had no idea what they were gonna do. They made crap up on the spot all through the first movie, too.
      • This troper seconds that opinion. The film makes a lot of sense if you were actually paying attention through the plot of the first two films (basically treating it as a series instead of a film with a ton of sequels) and it's quite plain if your Willing Suspension of Disbelief accepts the in-universe rules.
      • Third...ed? Yeah. You have to pay attention, just like with the first one -- but people forget that when the first movie came out, no one understood it. They thought it was all plot holes. Name something that doesn't make sense and I'll throw a dollar at it.
  • The final battle of World's End, where the Pearl and the Dutchman blow the Endeavour to bits bugged me. Sure, both the Dutchman and the Pearl were cool ships, but even both of them put together had fewer guns than a Man of War like Endeavour. On top of that, they attacked in precisely the worst possible way, flanking the Endeavour so that it could fire all of its guns at them, while they could only use half of their total cannon. If Beckett had given the order to fire, instead of standing there like a slack-jawed idiot the movie would have had a very different ending.
    • The Dutchman was an unbeatable supernatural ship. The Pearl was at least as legendary as the Dutchman. Each stood a reasonable chance against the Endeavour one-on-one, and with Beckett only able to devote half his crew to fighting each, it was a lost cause, no matter how much of a fight he would go down with.
      • Let's do this step by step, shall we:
      1. Ship armament. As you may or may not know, ship armament is measured in pounds per broadside, simply adding the weight of all the cannonballs in one broadside, every gun fired once. The Endeavour, (as her sister ship, the Dauntless) are straightforward copies of the HMS Victory, so I will use her armament as a base of comparison. This leaves us at a broadside of 1080 pounds. The Dutchman, canonically speaking, is a fluyt, 408 pounds per broadside were published as armament. The Black Pearl, as an East-Indiaman-Class and smallest of the three, features a broadside of 192 pounds. We've established, that in terms of firepower, the Endeavour is far superior, even to the two put together.
      2. Armour. A wooden hull offers absolutely no protection against Cannonballs fired at close range, and they take ships apart quite easily (if not this quickly, but that's the Rule of Cool for you), but they are also not significantly slowed, which gets us to
      3. Tactics. Thier tactics are smeg, so to say. As a troper before me has already stated, attacking a warship from both sides is clearly a bad idea, for it can use 96% of its firepower (bow and stern guns excluded), while you can only use less than 50% of yours, and if your ships already lack firepower, well... Excuse me, last troper, you are mistaken about the only able to devote half his crew-part. The HMS Victory had a crew of at lest 850, and is, as every ship of the line, capable of furnishing all guns with the crew required. To quote: It is not only possible, it is essential. In fact Nelson's Tactic at the Battle of Trafalgar consisted of putting his ships between enemy ships, just for these reasons. In addition, keeping in mind that a cannonball will easily pass through a ship, the Black Pearl and the Dutchman would also inflict major damage to each other unless of course, they are saved by
      4. Supernatural Abilities. Granted, both good ships are cool supernatural ships, and the Dutchman is a submarine too. This being the case, sinking the Dutchman should prove quite impossible and even more useless, because she is essentially indestructible. The Black Pearl could even be damaged by the Interceptor, a ship of less than half half firepower. Jack even claims the damage was severe, altough he is most likely lying. Still: we see damage, and the Black Pearl can be sunk. Heck, it even was sunk once. Oh and another time by the Kraken. She can be destroyed, or at least could be, if one gave the order to fire. Imagine a naval battle, a maelstrom of several dozen ships, guns blazing, some battles even going on abord ships. What is the last thing you will hear? Right, your captain yelling two decks above you. That is why, in a battle situation, a gun crew will, with absolutely NO exception, open fire on an enemy ship whenever possible without waiting for an order. Also the captain might be dead, and joined by most of his officers, too, disrupting the command structure, and it would not be the first time. Conclusion: In reality, this battle would have been won by the Endeavour, and quite easily, too. But this is a movie, and there is something we call artistic license, and I respect it. Still when, like in this case, artistic license is extended to an equivalent of a Roger-Moore-era-James-Bond beating Superman unconscious with a ruber chicken, I can' help but wonder, if there could not have been a better solution for the climax of a trilogy than Errr... The good guys win, because... um... We say so... Yes. Fine. This approach to filmmaking just bugs me.
      • Considering that the EITC commanded the Dutchman for the whole movie up to that point, the Endeavour's crew was probably under explicit orders not to fire on her. Still doesn't explain not shooting the Pearl, though.
    • Actually, for a few centuries (around the time that POTC would have taken place), that was exactly how ships fought. They lined up (in rows if it were armada-to-armada), headed toward each other, and shot as they sailed past (and, if they had bow or stern cannons, before/after as well). Then they turned around and did it again. The limited firepower of rather primitive cannons and relative speed of two ships sailing away from each other limited battle time. And no, they did not fight in maelstroms. They broke apart and sank. That's just the Rule of Cool.
      • Incidentally, that solves the problem of the rest of the pirate armada. They were shooting at the random ships of the East India Trading Co. armada offscreen.
        • Actually, no, at the time of POTC (1740s-50s?), they did not fight like that. Warships fought by lining up in single, long, thin 'line of battle', so as to display all their broadsides to the enemy and maximize their firepower. Victory usually went to the side who gained the weather gage (being upwind of the enemy), and thus able to pick the range of the engagement at their leisure. Also, 'crossing the T' was a prevalent tactic. This entailed manuevering to have the enemy's line perpendicular to your own, so you can engage him with all your broadsides, and he can only fire his bow chasers. So yeah, the battle at the end of POTC was total bull.
        • The time is more likely 1770s to 1780s, based on the ship rigs and the clothing, apart from that, I agree completely.
    • You guys do know why becket didn't give the order didn't you. He says to himself: 'Its just good buisness, thats just it' well, I like to believe that he knew he could win easily (as did the good guys) but he was evaluating the two side's causes (hence the deep thought while his crew were asking him to give the order) and had come to the conclution that while the pirets were fighting for freedom, he was just in it for personal gain, and realised he was in the wrong.
      • ...Wow, no. Good gods, man, did you even watch the movie? That's not even remotely on the same planet as what actually happened. Beckett was just rambling because he realized he was about to be the center of a cannonball sandwich. He didn't think the Pirates were right. He was trying to justify himself to the very end. This is just...wow, I haven't seen a conclusion that far off the mark for a good long time.
      • Acutally, I did see the movie, and like the tropers above will tell you, he could have won, plus JUST good buissness seems to me like the WORST justification to murdering hundreds ever. And you thought my conclution was off the mark...
      • He was in it to make money and control the seas. That was his motivation. "Just good business" was his pithy catch phrase. Yes, he could have won, but he was freaking out because he's a businessman, not a sailor or a soldier, and even if his side won, his personal ship was right out front and guaranteed to get blown to hell even if he did manage to somehow destroy the undead super ship filled with unkillable fishmen. He never "realized he was in the wrong". It was a straight-up Villainous BSOD at the end there, not him suddenly realizing the error of his ways.
      • Thanks for explaining, that makes sense now.
    • Exactly how was the Endeavour, or any other ship in the EITC fleet for that matter, supposed to kill the Dutchman? It is an invincible submarine crewed by the undying. At most all they can hope to do is sink every other ship in the pirate fleet, which will leave the new captain of said invincible submarine monumentally pissed off. I'm sure every single crewman aboard the Endeavour realized just how incredibly screwed they were the second the Dutchman came back, and no one saw the point in trying to fight on.
      • Uh... I'm not quite sure where the Dutchman was stated to be invincible. Particularly when you see it's mast getting torn to shreds by a single dose of Chain-shot. And moreover, even if the ship itself always came back, it did have one glaring weakspot... The captain's heart. The only reason the ship was immortal was because it was tied to Davy Jones' curse, not the other way around. Tia Dalma made it specifically that way, after all. The Dutchman "Has to have a captain," not because it's some insane undeniable fact, but because it's the only reason the Dutchman's magic persists. Blow up the heart, revoke anyone having ownership of the Dutchman, and the whole thing is gone. Really, all Beckett had to do was apply More Dakka until the damn ship was torn to shreds, and it wouldn't get back up again. Between that explanation for how to sink the Dutchman and the Pearl having been sunk once before and once after, really shouldn't have been that hard for Beckett to simply say "Fire," and win outright.
    • Like to add: I don't think Beckett ever planned on being in the line of fire. For god's sake, he was having tea on deck! That's terminal hubris.
      • Having just finished watching it again, it strikes me that there's a fairly obvious answer to why the Endeavour got sunk. Beckett's men were waiting for the order to fire, and Becket absolutely froze. By the time his Lieutenant realised that Beckett wasn't going to order anything, it was already too late to save the Endeavour. As for the rest of the Armada, they've just watched a maelstrom fiercer than anything they've ever seen (seriously, read up on maelstroms, they don't ever get that bad) seen two ships sail into it, one of which definitely sank, but then it comes back, and two ships, one of them a freighter, take out the endeavour, supposedly one of the greatest battleships. And there's still more pirates. As captain, would you be eager to order your men in against that?
  • Speaking of the final battle, why did all the characters act sad when the Dutchman went into the whirlpool, and then surprised that it came back out? Everybody in the movie by this point knows the Dutchman has susbmarine capabilities, so what the hell?
    • They weren't sad that the Dutchman went down. They were sad that Will just got killed.
      • Also, they couldn't be sure that it was coming back, or that Will would succeed Davy Jones. The idea that stabbing the heart and cutting out your own meant you replaced the previous captain was just a superstition--possibly one with truth in it--but no one had proved it to be valid until Will came back out.
  • Speaking of the final battle, let's have a look at the very first: The Pearl raids Port Royale. Nice. A ship like the Dauntless would have a crew of at least 800, so, where are those guys? Why are they not fighting? They should greatly outnumber the pirates, who are undead, fine, but they can be dismembered or, in a more Disney-Way, locked up or tied up. They do not seem stronger than normal Humans... In addtion: I would not like to fight five guys alone. Even if I had a sword and they were unarmed. You can kill a guy or two, nd the others will just jump on top of you.
    • Firstly, watch the raiding party scene again: The Pearl is out on the bay, between Port Royal and the Dauntless! Also, the Navy was returning fire from the Fort, firing on the Pearl wasn't doing any good. But the ship wasn't the perceived easier fight, or the worst threat, as a pirate ship is basically a floating war machine, but one that can't come on land. It was the (presumed mortal) men raiding the town -- killing, looting, raping, setting fires in a town full of defenseless people. If you were a navy guy, where would you be? Protecting civilians and fighting bastards with your massive stores of firearms, or in a little dingy, completely deserting everyone to try and get past a ghost ship that was assailing on your shore with no protection from cannon fire?
    • Your last statement is based on the assumption that the crew would be sleeping on-shore, which they normally would not. They should be sleeping on board, returning fire, greatly outgunning a ship like the Black Pearl, which is canonically a tuned freighter rather than a war machine (in contrast to the Dauntless, which is definitely the latter) Secondly: The Navy is not returning fire. The guys in the fort are redcoats, the colonial land forces of the Empire.
    • Even excluding the Dauntless and Interceptor, in a gunnery duel between the Pearl and the fort, the fort should win anyways. It's tougher, a more stable firing platform, and can mount larger guns. The only limiting factor in the fort's effectiveness would be the quality of the gunners- a real concern given that they are garrison troops. Nevertheless, the fort- which theoretically is there to fend of naval assaults - should be able to take potshots at the Pearl with relative impunity.
      • But that scene introduces the Pearl showing it blasting the bejesus out of Fort Royal at the onset. How it was able to do that to a fort placed up so high doesn't make sense, but they were. Also, in the first movie, the cursed Pearl had that huge fog following it around. Odds are, it obstructed the men at the fort in their aiming.
  • WTF is with Beckett and his "just good business" Catch Phrase? Breaking your agreement with other people is not good business - it is, in fact, the opposite. Word tends to get around quite quickly if you stop keeping your end of the bargain when you negotiate with people, and in a situation like what Beckett was trying for with the East India Trading Company (a complete corporate monopoly of all trading routes), you need people to trust you - which they won't, if you've proven that you'd be inherently incapable of negotiating in good faith if your life depended on it. Otherwise, they start looking for methods that don't involve dealing with you to get what they want - and, when they're dealing with a Manipulative Bastard like Beckett, those ways may will involve removing said bastard from power if at all possible, by any means possible.
    • Then again, is it really good for business to keep someone like Jack Sparrow around? Beckett wasn't saying, "Breaking deals is good business," he was saying, "Getting rid of all the pirates is good business."
    • Besides, it's hardly good business to leave a professional wild card like Jack Sparrow running around when you already know that he hates you (and you return the feeling). I doubt any of Beckett's merchant prince buddies would fault him for going back on that deal.
      • That's not what "just good business" means. It's an echo, and it's meaning changes, depending on who's using it and in what context. It's used as a justification for cruelty, dishonor, greed, and cowardice, and later Beckett repeats it when his ultimate defeat becomes reality -- he never planned on losing, you see. But when he says it "to" Jack earlier, when he assumes he's won and Jack's come crawling for his forty pieces of silver, the lips say "good business", but the eyes say "pwned!"
  • All they needed is Will's blood... so he was threatening to shoot himself. Hey, blood! Not like five quarts would all vanish into thin air before they could squeeze a bit into the chest from the headless corpse... And all the Calypso crap in the third movie... a giant black chick standing in a toilet. Whu-fuh? She could have been left out of the thing entirely and not changed the story much at all... Feng thinks Elizabeth is the incarnation of something that doesn't exist, and later on, pow! random whirlpool for the 'cool' battle.
    • Blood coagulates. They were on the Pearl when Will made his threat, not near the chest (which was back on Isla De Muerta), so his blood may not have been sufficient to break the curse. And, since Will was the last Turner (as far as they knew), if they screwed up and failed to break the curse, they were doomed to an eternity of a Fate Worse Than Death.
      • Coagulates and spoils. How long would a jar of corpse-salvaged blood last in the tropical Caribbean heat, before it's so much clotted sludge? Not long enough to reach the island where the treasure was, that's for sure.
    • I also think the condition of the curse is that the person making the "blood sacrifice" has to put the coin in. That's why Barbossa made Elizabeth hold the coin and drop it in. It's not really a blood SACRIFICE to the heathen gods if someone scoops up your blood and drops it in for you. Debatable whether forcing you to make the sacrifice against your will counts, but it seems logical that someone else making the payment in your name doesn't count.
      • Can't be true. Will dropped the coin Jack stole for him.
    • At that point, I think Will was leaning backwards while standing on the edge of the ship. If he had shot himself, his body would have fallen into the ocean. It might not have been impossible to gather some of his blood after that, but it would have added complications.
    • Besides, they had Will, they were in the home stretch to being free of the curse. Leaving him alive was a precaution - we don't want to screw things up at the last minute, do we? They could have at least TOLD him that they only needed a drop or so, he might have been a little more reasonable to work with.
    • Those Two Guys did--then Scary Black Man said otherwise.
  • Why does Jack (the monkey) take a medallion and become cursed again? If it were a human being I could understand; humans have high intelligence and can enjoy many pleasures apart from the base biological ones, and may consider the ability to eat, drink, and have sex a fair price for being immortal so they can eternally enjoy the finer things in life (ranging from good conversations, to being able to see the course of history for centuries to come, to crushing their enemies beneath their heels with their now invincible bodies). But a monkey... why would he want to be immortal at such expense?
    • It's a monkey. It doesn't know about the effects of the chest.
    • Also, it might have simply acted with survival in mind. What better way to preserve your life than by becoming immortal?
    • Plus, I think you're making a pretty big assumption that the monkey was able to put the idea that he'd been cursed and the shiny gold piece he grabbed a long time ago together. He probably just thought the gold was pretty and interesting, and that's why he grabbed it.
    • Wasn't it only supposed to curse you if you took more than one piece from the chest though?
      • No! Where does this "only curses you if you take more than one piece" Fan Wank keep coming from?
      • That.... really doesn't make any sense. Jack was cursed from taking just one piece in the first movie.
    • Barbossa trained the monkey to steal those medallions, back when they were collecting those which had been sold or bartered away or lost in dice games, before the Pearl's crew learned they were needed to break the curse. Jack just did what he'd been trained to do.
    • Wait, does this mean that they got the monkey to do the blood sacrifice as well? Because that's a funny thought. What if they'd forgotten that the monkey took one of the medallions as well?
    • Monkeys can actually be a good bit smarter than the OP gives credit for. There was a lab situation that actually led the monkeys to basically realize their enclosure was cleaned out reasonably close to them being fed, and thus believe their waste was valuable to the researchers, thus they would shit in their hands and offer it to the researchers in hopes of being rewarded. Yes. Seriously. Also, Jack is a little bastard, it's entirely possible that he gave up physiological satisfaction for the satisfaction of screwing with people for eternity, with the constant hunger and monkey-horniness making fairly pissed off.
      • Actually, there's a real answer to this one, beyond conjecture, and it gives Jack the Monkey more credit than all of the above: Unlike the crew, the Monkey doesn't pull for Barbossa out of fear or respect -- he's Barbossa's constant, devoted bestie. President of the Barbossa fan club, even. Then Jack murderers Barbossa. So, monkey steals gold. Next time you see the monkey, he's doing what? Terrorizing Captain Jack, haunting his ship like a ghost and otherwise making Jack's life hell in his own little way (throwing Jack's precious hat overboard, for example). Jack can shoot him all he wants, but the monkey's here to stay, a constant reminder of Barbossa. It's vengeance, baby. Half-baked, trifling monkey vengeance. Notice, once Barbossa's alive and well, the monkey sets out to save Jack from the locker and doesn't pester him again?
  • How was Barbosa not going to make the mistake of Jack being Captain Jack Sparrow again? Was he going to change Jack's name somehow?
    • ......Seriously? He was going to kill Jack so that he wouldn't be captain again. How was that not blindingly obvious?
      • Didn't the first mutiny remove his captainship anyway?
        • This troper just got the impression he was being sarcastic. Forgetting somebody is who they are is a difficult mistake to make, and not particularly relevant here. It was just empty bravado on Jack's part, and Barbossa was just (obtusely) pointing out how little sense it actually made.
          • I took Jack's comment to be more like "you forgot how awesome I am." with Barbossa saying that he would take that into account this time.
  • Based on what I've read about what's being planned for the fourth Pirates movie, Will and Elizabeth were never intended to be in it because their story is over. Now all the tabloids are saying "Orlando Bloom is blowing off the fourth Pirates movie to spend time with his girlfriend!" How can he blow off being in a movie he was never going to be in in the first place?!
    • Simple answer is it's the tabloids. They tend to make it up as they go along and pull things out of their ass in the name of making money. Sometimes they will get it right or say something somewhat based in fact. However most of the time it's BS. Besides what do you think would sell more copies? "PotC4 to star only Depp!" or "Bloom fed up with PotC! Refuses to return for sequel!"
      • Well, since I personally only really care about Johnny Depp and nothing for Orlando Bloom I guess I'll read the "to star only Depp!" copy please. When you're finished with it, of course.
  • Okay, so in the second movie, when Will and Jack meet, and Jack shows Will his "drawring" of a key, Jack goes on to say, "So, you have to sneak on board the Dutchman, swipe the key from this immortal, magical, guardian of the ocean, who will totes kill you dead if he gets any idea what you're up to, all without getting murdered by his immortal, magical crew, and bring it back to me, easy peasy." This is really where Will, at this point, should simply say, "Jack, that's insane and convoluted. I'm a blacksmith. Assuming this is to scale, I'll make you a key and then we can run off and nab this chesty thing of yours, all without once encountering any immortal, magical people." It would have simplified things immensely, and it would have made perfect sense.
    • Will is a blacksmith. Locksmiths make keys.
      • And swordsmiths make swords. Will's clearly a bit more flexible than your average blacksmith. But probably the drawing wasn't accurate enough, or sufficiently to scale, to base a new key off of.
    • I'd like to answer that, but really, it'd have been hilarious to hear Will actually say that, in exactly those words. Still, the key and chest are probably enchanted so that only the original key works (dunno if Will had any reason to think that, though he might've guessed it just from all the mystical stuff Jack's dragged him into already).
    • Also, there is no mention of how credible Jack's source for the drawing is, so probably neither Jack nor Will (nor anyone else) expects the drawing to look too much like the key itself. Though it eventually ends up being identical, they have no way of knowing that at the time.
    • If the drawing wasn't identical to the key, then why does it even exist? As a clue that you need a key to open a chest?
      • Presumably, so you'd know roughly what the correct key looked like. Presumably it's not the only key in the Caribbean, or even the only one kept on board the Flying Dutchman.
      • Oy oy oy, you can't make an identical key from a scale drawing. It's not a blueprint. It doesn't tell you what materials the key is made of, the thickness, the weight, all that stuff.
        • Locks, specially locks of that era, rely on a key's shape to be opened, not on the key's composition. Weight and materials aren't really a problem, as long as you don't make the key light enough to break under pressure. Thickness could be a problem, though, depending on how big the lock opening is. Still, one would think the solution would be to make several similar keys of varying thicknesses.
          • Did you see how complicated the lock for the chest was? It wasn't a normal lock of that era. It was really complex. A basic replica wouldn't have been able to unlock it, even without the magic.
        • It's a magic key to a magic chest. A copy wouldn't have the magic, and therefore wouldn't be able to open it.
        • Plus, would the audience seriously enjoy watching thirty minutes of Will Turner in his blacksmithing shop hammering together that same key in variety of thickness? May as well call it Pirates of the Caribbean: Turner makes Keyes
        • Turner: Locksmith of the Caribbean is in development for CBS. It's scheduled to air after Treebeard, where the Ent plays a Columbo-style detective who solves crime... very slowly.
        • They could have tried the easy way of getting the chest and making a key for it, before doing it the hard way of selling your soul to a sea demon, trying to sneak past a crew of immortal fish men, and steal a key to the captain's most precious belonging off of his person, off of a ship that may submerge underwater and kill you at any moment! Or at least do a scene transition to 5 extra seconds of them failing the easy method.
          • I just realized, it's even worse than that. They didn't need the key at all! They could simply blast the chest with a cannon shot, exactly like the Brits threatened to do in the third movie! (I presume that if the chest could withstand that, Davy wouldn't cooperate with Becket).
            • Jack wanted the key so he could open the chest. He needed to open the chest so he could take the heart. He needed to have the heart itself so he could use it as a bartering tool to get out of his contract with Davy Jones. Blowing up the chest removes the bartering tool he so desperately needs. Make any sense?
            • How is bartering while threatening to stab the heart out of chest any different than bartering while threatening to shoot the heart inside the chest with a canonn? Apparently it differs so little that Beckett doesn't mind putting the heart back into the chest and pointing a cannon at it. So no, previous troper's argument does not in fact make any sense.
            • There's also no indication that any of the protagonists know the chest can be broken open like that. Beckett could have figured it out easily enough after he'd captured it- just call Jones over to his ship, point a cannon or two at the chest, and watch him freak, and you know that enough mundane force will do the trick. However, if that detail isn't part of the folklore, then Jack, Will, Elizabeth, and Norrington would have no way of knowing.
              • As stated above, they didn't know. Jack, Will, and Elizabeth have all gained a healthy respect for supernatural forces, curses, magic, and the power of the undead. When they needed a magic key to open a magic chest, they attempted to obtain the magic key to open the magic chest. Ignoring the magic for a more practical solution never crossed their minds. Beckett is a much more cynical individual, with absolutely no respect for magic whatsoever. As such, he represents the death of magic and wonderment in the world. Beckett has the Kraken killed unceremoniously offscreen, he makes Davy Jones into his personal bitch, and faced with the magic chest/magic key combo above, he simply responds with, "Why not just blow it the fuck up?" This is what makes him the villain of the film; we see that his cold, heartless pragmatism does, in fact, get results (much quicker and more effective results than anyone else, in fact)...but at the cost of everything that makes the world great to live in, at least for a pirate like Jack and Barbossa. The brief dialogue the two shared, overlooking the dead Kraken, was probably the most easily overlooked yet most important scene in the second and third films.
    • Even given that it's a magical key to a magical chest that can't be counterfeited or busted open, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to go steal the unguarded chest first, and only then go after the heavily guarded key? So that once the powerful Eldritch Abomination clues into what you're doing, he won't be able to send his unkillable minions to stop Phase 2 of your plan since you'll have already done it and moved on to Phase 3?
      • They didn't know the key and chest were split up and that one was on the Flying Dutchman and the other buried on an island.
        • They've got a magical frickin compass, don't they? If wanting the key points to the ship and wanting the chest does not point to the ship, then you have your heading.
          • The compass wasn't working because it was on a ship, it wasn't working because Jack didn't know what he wanted. Which is why he uses Elizabeth to get to the chest instead.
    • Just wanted to point out: the idea that opening Jones' chest was as easy as turning a drawing into a key probably already crossed the addled mind of one of his damned crew. He makes the drawing, either from memory or a tracing, he escapes, then sneaks off like Will did. He fashions a key, then heads to Isla Cruces. The results were probably disappointing at best (didn't work) and gruesome at worst (and he got caught).
      • That's actually a pretty brilliant theory, the moreso as it explains why a drawing of the key even existed for Jack to purloin in the first place.
  • So Calypso is finally released from her human form, is incredibly pissed from her imprisonment, and surrounded by the people who did it, so she ... turns into a pile of crabs and makes a giant whirlpool. That's it. Now, a giant whirlpool is pretty dangerous, but considering that she's the Goddess of the sea and she's got a good reason to kill everyone there, why didn't she summon a category 5 hurricane, or a tsunami, or another kraken? After all the build-up of how powerful she was and how angry she would be when released, she just becomes a background hazard afterwards and then forgotten.
    • The whirlpool only vanished when Davy Jones was consumed by it, so it seemed to be Calypso's way of making the Flying Dutchman and Black Pearl fight to the death. Since the pirates and Davy Jones held equal blame for her imprisonment and she had mixed feelings about them both, she decided to just let them fight it out over who dies. So long as somebody paid, she was happy.
      • Which is perfectly in keeping with her character, given that her lack of constancy is what started the whole mess with Jones in the first place. Basically, it's God(dess) saying "Screw 'em all, and let chance sort it out."
    • Also, having her turn into Gojira (or Cthulhu, or whatever) and happily chomp away Beckett's fleet is a bit anti-climatic, as funny as it sounds. ;-)
    • Of the people present, only Davy Jones was actually involved in imprisoning her; the rest of them had just taken over jobs left vacant by the people who'd imprisoned her. Seeing as how they decided to free her (admittedly for the sake of their own self-interest), she may very well have decided not to hold her imprisonment against them.
      • Will deliberately set her on Jones by ratting him out for betraying her. She becomes one with nature again, opens a maelstrom, (capable of robbing both the Dutchman and the Pearl of their legendary advantages) and waits for Will to fulfill his destiny by stabbing the heart.
  • In the first movie, Elizabeth negotiates the Pearl leaving Port Royal by threatening to drop the medallion off the side of the boat and into the ocean. The crew tries to bluff her by saying it isn't important, but when she pretends to drop it, they react with fear. Why? Elizabeth throwing the medallion overboard isn't a huge deal. If she really did drop it, one of them would've just been able to hop in the water, do the whole ocean-floor-walking thing and go get it. In fact it would've worked out better for them, since then they'd have the medallion and they wouldn't have to strike any sort of deal. They could have their cake and eat it too.
    • Ships move faster than they look, and there's always the possibility the medallion could've been swallowed by some fish or something...best not to risk it.
      • Except that Barbosa didn't tell them to start sailing away until AFTER he and Elizabeth had made their agreement.
      • Instinct. how else would they react to it? i'm sure the original Troper didn't think of this IJBM during their first viewing... plus the moment gives Elizabeth a short moment of bad-ass.
        • Obviously he didn't think of it the first time he saw it, because the fact that they are invincible skeleton things didn't get brought up until a little bit later. Also, how many times he watched it before it started bugging him is completely irrelevant. An It Just Bugs Me can start bugging you the day you see the movie, or 300 viewings later. Thus, the IJBM still stands.
    • I dunno 'bout you, but even if I were immortal, I sure as hell wouldn't want to have to wander around the ocean floor looking for a piece of gold the size of a beer coaster. If it isn't taken somewhere by the current or buried in the sand or eaten by some sea creature, it's still an itty bitty thingamajiggie that I'll have to search for mostly by touch. Fun.
    • The answer's simple: the water's murky and polluted, and the medallion could get washed in any direction by an undertow or buried in the sand. Even if you could dive down to find it without worrying about something like breathing, you still wouldn't be able to guarantee where it landed. Plus, it's night, and it's the 1700s. There was no way to see where the medallion fell or to find it with your eyes.
    • Not to mention how much work they must have done tracking done every, single, last piece - I'm sure the last thing they wanted to see was someone throwing the last remaining coin into the water, to (as other Tropers have said) get eaten by sharks or whatever. The pirates' not wanting to go through additional pain in the behind should more than explain their reaction.
    • They should also be under time pressure. They are still within reach of Port Royal's cannons and cannot afford to search for hours for a single goldcoin in a pitch-black sea (once it gets day again, they will no longer be camouflaged by the darkness, which makes their black ship nigh invisible by night). Even if they are nearly indestructible, their ship is not, and cannonfire might be detrimental even to the undead.
      • The problem with the "Time Constraints" and "The Murky Water/Fish" Theories is that it's pretty apparent that the coins pulse when they are in the water. So it makes it pretty easy to find something when it's going off like a beacon inside of your brain whenever it's in the water. Also, being immortal, and thus having all the time in the world, it may be an inconvenience to go find it, while under cannon fire, but it doesn't make a damn bit of difference in the end, because they will still be able to get to the Island in their own good time and drop it off, making the panic only justifiable if they were a bunch of normal, non-immortal, non-skeletal pirates, but still not making a damn bit of sense for Barbosa and his crew. And even if the ship gets shot to hell and back, they can climb up the anchor line of any other ship and just take it, no problems.
      • Not necessarily. Think about if you're making a sandwich. You've got the bread out, put the meat on, put the lettuce on, added some ranch and bacon bits, and you're ready to go. Then, you think you might want a glass of milk, so you leave the sandwich on the table to fetch one. While you're doing this, your cat hops on the table, and nearly knocks over your sandwich. If you're anything like most people, you'd make some--possibly frantic--effort to save your sandwich and shoo the cat.
        But why? I mean, you've got more bread, more meat, more dressing and more lettuce and it would only take like five minutes to make another one. Why not just let it fall or let the cat have it?
        Because when you're that close to having something you want/need in your hands, anything that's going to delay it further is going to cause that reaction, especially if it's something you've been wanting/needing for a long time. Yes, they could have faffed about on the ocean floor, searching for the coin while letting their ship get destroyed. But that would have been a lot of work and time to get something that had literally been within arms' reach.
  • What did Beckett mean by "Finally." in the opening of AWE?
    • He's glad that the pirates are gathering because it means he can wipe them out in one stroke.
      • That sounds reasonable, but...doesn't he say it in response to the henchman reporting that "they've started to sing" or something like that?
      • It's possible that he simply means "finally, they're all admitting that they're pirates by singing the old pirate song, and now they're accepting their fates" or something along those lines.
        • I always thought that them singing was supposed to be some sort of "call" to the Pirate Lords in order to convene the Court and save themselves. Note how Barbossa tells Sao Feng "the song has been sung" during their first encounter in the movie.
    • My guess? Before starting his war on piracy, Beckett had always been told pirates sang a lot, and was disappointed that, even with all the pirates he'd been dealing with, it had taken so long before he got to hear a real, honest-to-god pirate chanty. ... And now I've got this odd image of Beckett as the guy supervising the railroad workers from Blazing Saddles.
    • Seeing as how the phrase "the song has been sung" comes up at least a dozen times through out the film, it seems fairly obvious that the song is (as another troper said) as signal for a meeting of the pirate lords. Beckett probably found this out through interrogation.
    • Simple: He enjoys a rousing pirate song, and was quite disappointed that they didn't sing to him earlier.
    • Okay, for the sake of clarity: Beckett knows the song calls the Brethren Court to order all in one place, and -- as was stated above -- he likes the idea, as it would make taking them out a lot more efficient. So, he kills everyone he could find with a connection to piracy -- hundreds maybe -- in hopes they'd sing this friggin' song, so when they did start to sing it,.... "Finally".
  • Who could possibly have thought that the opening scene of the 3rd movie was in any way a good idea? I'm not squeamish, but doesn't it seem odd to have a scene, in a series that has cleaned up piracy of all things, in which the government/military is instituting mass hangings? It's not even necessary! Sure, it's a massive, Anvilicious Kick the Dog moment, but...they don't really have trouble establishing who their villains are, and there is no character development, plot exposition, or...anything in that scene. What was its purpose? How did no one point out that parents who had watched the previous two movies with their kids might be displeased when the third one showed a kid being executed along with scores of other people of dubious guilt? I cannot fathom the sheer stupidity.
    • It does serve a reason. The fact that the song has been sung over the medallion (the one the kid dropped) is what serves to note to the assorted Pirate Lords that the Brethren Court is convening. Beckett presumably knew enough about the Brethren Court to be trying to trigger this.
      • It shows that the East India Company is rounding up every pirate they find, which shows the entire motivation for 90% of the cast. And it shows Becket collecting pieces of eight, hinting that there's something important he's looking for, much like the chest in the previous movie. (they're the wrong kind of pieces of eight, but still.)
        • This troper actually got hung up on the mechanics of that scene. Apparently even the physics of hanging don't work the same in the POTC universe. You can't just set up six ropes and march up the next six people in line, take down the bodies, reset the ropes and bring up the next six. You can't just hang anyone by throwing a rope around their neck, unless you don't care how long it takes for them do die. Ideally, hanging works by snapping the convicted's neck when their body weight hits the end of the rope. This requires knowing at least within a small ballpark how much the person weighs and measuring the rope accordingly. Too light, and instead of breaking the neck they strangle to death. Slowly. (One man actually managed to survive his own hanging--the rope was wrong, and he SUCCESSFULLY argued to the judge that he was sentenced to be hanged, and he had been. In this case, doesn't count as the warrant specifically said "hanged by the neck until dead.") Too HEAVY for the rope, and they die really really fast, only by being decapitated. If you wanted to be a horribly slow, inefficient way of mass execution, hanging would have to be it. The sheer inconvenience of the method would easily outweigh any cost of the bullets and powder to shoot them. Never mind the mess involved in disposing of that many corpses on a small island (burning is not as efficient as people think--there's a reason Those Wacky Nazis had crematoria.)
          • The "Long Drop" method of hanging you refer to wasn't in use until 1872 and these films are all set in, what, the late 1700s? At this point they did actually use a standard length for everyone, so friends and family would actually run up to pull the legs of a hangee so that they'd die quicker instead of strangling slowly.
    • Beckett is a Complete Monster who a) wouldn't give a ass's rat about how much the men being hanged suffered as they hung, why make more work for the executioner when one length of rope will at least kill them, even if not ideally? And perhaps the time it would take to measure it correctly for each prisoner is longer than the time it takes them to die inefficiently? And b) it's a good demoralizing tactic. "Hey, pirates, check out what we're doing to your friends. Yah, plenty more to come, too, great innit?"
      • Who cares if they suffer or not? The point is it's grossly inefficient. It would take a truly ABSURD amount of time, you'd have people not dying immediately and others getting decapitated and it's all a huge mess and would probably take days, when bayoneting or shooting them in small groups would be just as fast and a lot more accurate. They way they throw ammo around elsewhere suggests it's not in short supply. That would still give them time to sing without leaving the soldiers cutting down people still choking and dragging headless corpses off and starting a general panic. And in a tangent, except for habeus corpus (which is easily and routinely suspended in emergencies anyway), they don't HAVE any of the rights that are being suspended in the first place under the laws of the day. There's a reason the founding US government felt the need to spell them all out--they WEREN'T automatically recognized as existing in the first place.
          • That story about a man being set free after surviving his own hanging is a myth. It never happened. People have survived initial execution attempts before, but there has never been a case where it was successfully argued in court that because the first attempt at execution failed, the condemned man had to be set free. And courts have always phrased it "hanged by the neck until dead".
  • This is a minor thing, but, when everyone's gearing up for the big war with the East India Trading Company, why don't some of them take a brief detour (I say brief because of how quickly sailing around the globe seems to be in At Worlds End) and pick up some of those Aztec coins from the first movie? They'd become unkillable and indestructible, which would give them a bit of an edge against their opponents (who have only got the one immortal, Davy Jones, on their side), and just return all the gold pieces when they were done? Like I said, it's a minor thing, and it doesn't really bug me, so much as it seems like a missed opportunity for awesomeness.
    • The second movie explicitly states that the Isla de Meurta sank into the sea in a massive storm. They couldn't get to the Aztec coins even if they wanted to.
    • Bad idea anyway. Ship to ship combat means lot of people will be lost at sea. You don't want to be immortal and lost at sea. Remember what happened to Will Turner Sr?
  • In the third film, why does Beckett leave Davy Jones's heart on The Flying Dutchman where, you know, Davy Jones is? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep it in his quarters where he could guard it carefully? On the same note, why does Jones seem absolutely against having his heart on the ship? It's possible he only stole it during the climax because the navy soldiers were busy attacking The Black Pearl. But why couldn't he have done it earlier? Not to mention he has an army of fishpeople who could just as easily do it for him? And he's nigh immortal too?
    • He did have the heart with him initially, but sent it over to the Dutchman (with guards) so that Jones would have a constant reminder of who was boss. After all, in Beckett's estimation Jones wouldn't try to take the heart back when the guards could blast it before he even got close to it, and he was largely correct- it wasn't until Jones goes totally Ax Crazy in the climax that he tries to do that. And Jones doesn't want the heart on his ship because he hates it and what it represents- his lost humanity.
      • Also note that this theory is exactly what happens; someone absconds with the heart, it's just not Jones, and as soon as Jones sees that he has an opening (Mercer's bodyguards having been killed in the first exchange of fire with the Pearl) he acts.
      • Agreed. Note the tear that appears when he's listening to his locket. He picks it up with one of his beard-tentacles and stares at it, shocked. Then he starts shaking with rage. He's realized that he's feeling soft, and he knows what that means.
      • So, if it's having his heart nearby that makes Jones susceptible to emotion, then Beckett may have wanted the chest on board the Dutchman so Jones would be vulnerable to intimidation? Sneaky man, Beckett.
    • Probably to make it more of a threat for Jones. This way it would be absolutely clear that Beckett had the ability to kill Jones - not showing it to him would cause him to believe the threat was a bluff. Also, in the event that the Dutchman was overtaken by pirates (who knew from the previous film that Jones's heart was his weakness) who wanted to win the fight, Jones and a bunch of Mooks would be the only real casualties.
    • Food for thought- Jones can teleport. Keeping the heart on another ship is not the best way to keep it safe from him; at most, it will mildly inconvenience him by adding slightly to his travel time when he decides to go for it. The only way to truly keep it out of his reach would be to stash it on land, but then it would be too far away to work as an immediate threat to Jones. In short, it really doesn't matter what ship the heart is on, so long as it's surrounded by guns- which it is, until most of those marines get called away to fight the Pearl.
      • Another thought, what would happen if Jones was rebelling? If the heart was on land or on another ship, communications could have been delayed until Jones caused trouble. Jones would still be "under control" but something like refusing to go after someone fleeing would allow them to escape and that would cause more problems for the EITC. The closer the heart to Jones, the quicker the order to kill it could be relayed.
  • So, Barbossa and Swan head off to Singapore to ask Sao Feng for a ship. How did they get to Singapore in the first place? It's only the entire Pacific Ocean in the way.
    • They took passage on a ship. They couldn't hire a ship for a voyage without a destination, but they can hire a ship to Singapore.
      • And being Pirates, they couldn't just steal that ship? Even though they still needed the charts, it probably would have been a much easier trip through Singapore if they just stole them without asking Sao Feng for a ship.
        • And where are they going to get a crew for this ship? They're less than a dozen of them. They need Sao Feng's charts, a ship, and a crew to crew the ship.
    • For what it's worth, they probably didn't cross the Pacific; that would have meant rounding South America, and the most arduous and uncertain of journeys in the world on the other side (the Pacific wasn't really charted, and for those ships that had managed to cross it- all explorers at this point- lost large numbers of their crew to malnutrition and exhaustion). Even if it's slightly further (or maybe not, not sure) it would be more probable to cross the Atlantic to South Africa (Cape Town was well-established by then, and they would probably have found it a hospitable place to negotiate and rest, provided they were relatively discreet about their criminal status), and go on from there across whatever route was available. This was a relatively well-sailed route by then, so it would be fairly easy to get passage- by money, intimidation, working their passage or a combination of some of the above- on a merchant vessel going the right way. Also, easier to get to the right place if you're taking a route with a few stops on the way where you can change ships.
      • Also a lot easier to recruit the other Pirate Lords to the anti-Beckett crusade along the way, since most of those were from Europe or somewhere bordering the Indian Ocean.
  • In the first movie, Elizabeth bluffs the crew of the Black Pearl by threatening to drop the medallion into the ocean unless the Pearl leaves Port Royal and never returns. A couple things. One they're still in the shallows close to Port Royal, so it would be simple even for an ordinary man to retrieve the medallion. But the crew aren't ordinary men; they're immortal. As seen in the final battle, they could easily just jump in the water and go get it no problem. Barbossa and his crew react with fear when Elizabeth fakes dropping the medallion... But it would've actually worked out better for them, considering then they could get the medallion, keep Elizabeth and then not have to make any kind of deal anyway.
    • Even near port, the bottom of the ocean is rocky, murky with low visibility, and has a lot of crevices and sand. Additionally, objects very rarely fall straight down when dropped into it. Would you want to scour the area looking for a small object like the medallion? Sure, they COULD probably get it back, but it would be a lot of work and a lot of hassle, and a bit of prayer that nothing has come along and picked up the shiny thing, or that it hasn't been buried in the sand. To say nothing of the fact that while the pirates are immortal, the Black Pearl can still be damaged, and the longer they linger, the more they risk Norrington making a counter-attack. Immortal or not, they'd be royally screwed if they lost the ship.
      • The medallion "calls out to them," It wouldn't be as much hassle as all that. They could still find it in a reasonable amount of time with little effort.
        • It called out to them once in 10 years. That's what those waves were (there were waves, right? It's been a while since I watched the movie). It's pretty risky to put their faith in that. Still, I dunno if the Pearl sinking in the time it took them to look is such a big factor... can't they just steal another ship from the port after killing the crew?
      • It's the fastest ship ever, "nigh uncatchable". Even if they got another ship, that ship would be the equivalent of a donkey to their fast stallion. Plus, how shallow was the water in the port? It has to be deep enough for large vessels to get in without being beached. If a person got into the water, they'd be wading.
  • In the second movie, while climbing up the mountain one of the pirates points out that you don't need more than a few of them to crew the ship. So how does that lead both groups deciding they need to race to the top? It isn't as if one group making it to the top will stop the second group, and the odds of one group reaching the ship without the other don't seem that much better.
    • Um...it should be obvious. Each group wants to get to the top first so they can take the Pearl and leave the rest there. They're pirates. They'll take any opportunity to screw each other over for profit.
    • Still not sure what the race was for though. In the time it took to prep the ship for launch the other cage would've had plenty of time to get out, barring any more unfortunate incidents.
      • It's like the old joke about the guy and his friend in the woods and what happens if they see a bear, and the one guy says he'll be fine. He doesn't have to outrun the bear, he just has to outrun his friend. In this case, the second group to the top is the group that's closer to any angry pursuing natives.
    • You guys missed something, that's a bit of Fridge Horror going on here. The pirates were /starving/. First guys up? In a position of strength to kill off the other guys for a bit of a top-up.
    • It's not that the two groups of pirates wanted to abandon each other, they already knew they could. It's the realization for each that the others might do it to them. They were being defensive, not offensive. Pay attention to their facial expressions and it becomes obvious they were just scared of getting left behind.
  • At the beginning of the first movie, Mr. Gibbs warns Elizabeth not to sing about pirates because it will draw them in. If he's so worried about encounters with pirates. why is he WORKING WITH THEM later in the movie?
    • Did you miss the part where a solid 10 years have passed in the meantime? And how Mr. Gibbs clearly isn't at the same station in life? He's not worried about encounters with pirates because of some pathological fear; he's worried about encounters with pirates because, you know, pirates would try and kill him and take the ship. Later on, he loses whatever station he had, and it's likely he can only find work with pirates. Just like Norrington in the second film.
    • Also, recall the exact line of dialogue. "Cursed pirates sail these waters." Clearly it's not just the idea of being pillaged and murdered that's gotten him all superstitious.
    • Maybe Gibbs pulled a Heel Face Turn and deserted the pirates when Jack (the closest thing he has to a Heterosexual Life Partner) was exiled. He could be afraid of encountering Barbossa or another pirate with a grudge against him.
      • Unlikely by the timeline. Gibbs probably knew Jack from before.
    • Or maybe her singing was just getting on his nerves, and he told her it could attract pirates to scare her into shutting up.
    • Working with pirates and being on a navy ship that's attacked by them are kinda different things.
      • Not that different. Piracy was a fairly common career move for men who'd deserted from the Navy and couldn't seek legitimate employment for fear of being caught.
    • If any of you really payed attention to his character, you'd notice that Gibbs is very superstitious, and there have been multiple occasssions on which he claimed something would cause bad luck, so he said that line to Elizabeth out of superstition.
  • Davy Jones can only set foot on land every 10 years. Calypso is a sea goddess. So why could they only see each other when Davy Jones was able to come on land?
    • She was trapped as a human.
    • That was after. Davy Jones trapped her as a human because she wasn't there to boink him when his ten years of blueballs was up.
    • Probably, it was because properly doing his job as ferryman of the dead wouldn't leave him enough free time, while his day on shore is also his general "day off".
  • Why didn't Davey Jones just sink the Flying Dutchman to gain possession of the heart?? By bringing the heart on board, Beckett commits a fatal error equivalent to dangling a mouse on a string in front of a cat (or taunting an Evil Overlord with his small, easily disposable Artifact of Doom). It really weakens Davy Jones' character that he didn't think to do this, choosing to let himself be humiliated in public instead.
    • Well, this may be a Justified Edit for what's really an Villians Idiot Ball for Davey, but maybe Davey knew Beckett was smart and may have told his soldiers "If Davey Jones tries anything like sink his ship so that he gets away while we flounder helplessly in the ocean, shoot/stab the heart."
    • More than that, it was never just Mooks guarding the heart until the climax- Norrington and/or Mercer were always on hand, and both of them are smart enough to figure out what's happening if the ship starts to go down, and to take the neccessary precautions. After both of them are out of the picture, though (and Jones has recaptured the key) the first thing he does is go for the heart (though he probably can't sink the Dutchman in the middle of the battle).
  • What would've happened if the heart had actually been in the Jar of dirt, and destroyed by the fall? What happens if it somehow got destroyed by accident, without human agency?
    • Jack would have been the one to drop it, so he would become the new captain of The Flying Dutchman.
  • When Jack finally gets the heart in the third film why does he attract Jones's attention rather than stabbing it right away? (Note at this point the Kraken is dead so there is no longer a reason to keep Jones alive.) Jones only has time to kill Will because of Jack's grandstanding. The fridge stupidity is just annoying, although I guess it is appropriate that Jack is deprived of his chance at immortality by his own showing off.
    • He wasn't sure he wanted the immortality at the time.
      • This. As noted below he probably decided to try and force Johnes to back off without condemning himself to the captainship of the Dutchman.
      • Also, as you said, grandstanding. Jack spent god knows how long terrified of death, only to be sent to kinda-hell by Jones. He was savoring the moment. Cruel may be a matter of perspective, but even the devil thinks Jack's a butt-munch.
  • The three-way fight among Jack, Will and Norrington. Will wants to stab the heart, Norrington wants to give it to Becket. What does Jack want if he's so opposed to the idea of stabbing it?
    • Jack explicitly says this. He's not opposed to stabbing the heart on principle, but he wants to use it first to force Davy Jones to call the Kraken off him; he's afraid that if Jones dies it will just keep coming until he's dead. Will wants to stab the heart immediately, to free his father's soul from eternal damnation.
      • I guessed something like that but it makes no sense. Bootstrap had already spent decades on the Dutchman and wasn't in any immediate danger, surely he could spend there several more days needed to fulfil Jack's wish. On the other hand, Will had already witnessed Kraken's horrible menace first-hand, so wouldn't he want to get rid of the monster just as badly? And united with Jack he would've easily overcome Norrington. Even he didn't think of all this, why didn't Jack try to persuade him?
      • Will's dad is trapped in eternal damnation, Jack's facing either that or being eaten, and Norrington's spent the past several days taking orders from his Arch Enemy. None of them are all that logical at this point, I'd say.
      • Will's also impulsive and fiery - we see this in film 1, when he barges into a tent full of soldiers and demands they rescue Elizabeth, and even earlier in the film when he goes rogue to save Elizabeth rather than trying something less likely to kill him. He's also very loyal - if someone he cares for is in danger, he'll do anything to save them and he'll act without thinking. So his desire to immediately stab the heart and not do the more sensible thing - wait until Jack bargains with it, and then stab it and give it to Norrington (because nowhere in the agreement did Beckett say the heart had to be beating) - he wants to just kill it now.
      • Also, last time Will saw Jack was when he effectively sold Will into eternal slavery on the Dutchman to save his own skin. I don't think Will would be in any mood to cooperate with him at that point.
      • Considering the insane number of times the various MacGuffins from these films can slip from hand to hand in even five minutes, Will's desire to stab the heart immediately instead of risking it being swiped out from under him may well have been Genre Savvy, not obsessive.
    • Seems like the intelligent thing to do would have been for them to offer to return Jones' heart in exchange for, 1. Calling off Jack's debt, 2. Freeing Will's Father and 3. Maybe something nice for Norrington as well. It's kind of weird to assume Jones would only be willing to grant one request in exchange for his little Liche's phylactery.
      • How does it not make sense? Yes, the boys were being stupid, hence Elizabeth's melt-down, but it's not a headscratcher, really, just three grown men who hate each other fighting over something like squabbling children (not exactly unbelievable). If the guys had all worked together, they could've had everything, but Will was dead-set on stabbing the heart, not ransoming it. Plus, he just got through being betrayed by Jack, I don't see him playing nicely. Then there's Norrington, who was more than willing to screw over the two people who he figured ruined his life and took turns stealing Elizabeth away from him. Jack's the only one of them who might've gone for a compromise, but there's no way the other two would've trusted him with the heart, which is what they would've had to do. Also, Jack really didn't like Will and Norrington at this point and, considering what he'd just got done putting them both through, I think it's safe to guess which of them could be the biggest brat when he felt like it -- if given the heart, Jack might very well have screwed everyone else over. So yes, they were acting selfish, short-sited and completely immature, but it does make sense.
  • In DMC, Will challenges Davy Jones to a game of Liar's Dice, wagering his soul. His father, desperate to save his son, enters and intentionally loses. Will then rounds on him afterwards and berates him, telling him that he only needed to find the key, and that his father's sacrifice was unnecessary. The thing is, though, Will had not sworn an oath to Jones by that point, he had merely been given to Jones by Jack, and that's not the same. We can see, especially in the third film, that Davy Jones can exert considerable power over those who are sworn to his service. Had his father not intervened, Will would not have been able to escape the Dutchman for long, basically until Jones awoke, and commanded him to return. Will Turner Sr actually did the right thing.
    • Kids are Ungrateful Bastards, who never appreciate their parents' efforts for their sake.
      • It wasn't that he didn't appreciate it. If your dad got himself sent to prison for nothing because he jumped to a conclusion, would you be happy?
    • Also of note -though this is never directly addressed in the film itself- was that Bootstrap's sacrifice, noble though it may have been, was also completely pointless and handed victory to Jones. Will had bet eight fives. Jones had five fives, and Will had three. Had Bootstrap not intervened, and Jones called Will out instead, Will would have won.
      • Not quite. The rules of Pirate Dice as explained by the merchandise flat out states you can only call another player a liar on your own turn. You either bet, or you call the last person who bet out. Will's father wasn't sure whether or not Will could have won with that bet, but it didn't matter to him if he could. All that mattered was making sure Will couldn't lose... Which he did by not calling out his son and instead making such an outrageous bet that Davy Jones had no choice but to call him. As soon as he forced DJ's hand, Bootstrap succeeded in his own way; Will couldn't possibly lose and be forced to pay his bet. And if he'd actually won, DJ would have been forced to hand over the key... Then likely order Bootstrap to hand it right back since he's a member of the crew. So really, this was the best outcome Bootstrap could have hoped for.
  • What the hell was a water-mill doing on a god-forsaken island with no river to power it?
    • Let's say it's a sugar mill - An artifact so valuable at the time that the entire island population was living off it. Then, some decades before the movies, a volcano in the island began a mini-eruption and the river was deviated or ceased to surge at all, rendering the mill useless, and forcing the population to abandon the island altogether.
      • In the commentary I believe they mention that the islands population was killed off by an outbreak of plague.
    • Maybe it was a treadmill, powered by people walking in it.
  • How Norrington managed to get out from the said god-forsaken island and back to Port-Royal?
    • Sea turtles, mate.
    • According to Mercer, he was adrift at sea, and one of the EITC ships picked him up. Maybe he built a raft (by roping a couple of Sea Turtles, of course!)
  • Remember the pirate that Sparrow Sr. shot at the Pirate Council? Watch the scene closely (or watch the screenshot here). The guy was shot through the right shoulder! It should've been a grazing wound at worst, yet he drops on the spot, apparently dead. Ok, if you wave your hands especially hard, you could say the bullets were poisoned, but what was the point in shooting (no pun intended) the scene like this? Why not make the shot go in the heart?
    • You haven't looked at Only a Flesh Wound lately, have you? Read those pages, particularly the bits where they explain that "just a shoulder wound" is not some easily survivable, painless process. Especially with that period of firearms. In fact, if you were hit at all, your best bet was to have some medic saw the affected limb off with no anaesthetic and put tar on the resulting stump.
      I'll quote the relevant passage:

Bullet wounds to the shoulder will almost invariably either kill the victim from blood loss or cripple them for life. There are huge blood vessels in a human being's shoulder as well as lots of very delicate nerves and a very complex ball-and-socket joint that no surgeon on Earth can put back together once it's smashed by a bullet.

    • A shoulder wound, while a serious and almost certainly life threatening wound, is unlikely to be instantly fatal (as seen in this scene). That being said, the shock can cause somebody to pass out quite easily.
    • This troper is pretty sure the pirate was hit in the chest/lung area, not the shoulder. Also, we don't know what angle the round struck him from. It's possible it penetrated into his body and went through his heart, which would be instantly fatal.
      • Honestly, it doesn't matter if it's instantly fatal. Getting shot in any part of the body with a firearm of that period is going to cause enough damage/pain to at the very least make you fall over in shock. All that's required for the joke to work is: Gunshot --> Dude falling over.
  • In the first movie, in the scene where Elizabeth first encounters the pirates in their zombie form, two of them are hammering...something with hammers. What are they doing? It doesn't look as if they are forging or repairing anything, they are just hitting it.
    • ....Dramatic license? It looked cool and frightening at the same time.
  • Why is Bootstrap Bill Turner's blood the blood needed to lift the curse?
    • This is explained explicitly in the movie: They needed the blood of all the pirates that took gold from the chest. They still needed Turner's because they tossed him overboard before they realized this, so he was the last one they needed.
  • In the second movie Will offers Davy Jones a game of dice with the key to the eponymous chest as a bet. So wait, Davy isn't concerned in the slightest that some shaveling is aware of the key's (and, by extension, the chest's) existence? He doesn't kill Will simply for knowing too much, he makes no attempt to elicit the sources of said knowledge, he shows the key to Will?! Does this imply that if Will had somehow managed to win the game Davy would have given him the key? What the hell!?
    • The key and the chest are part of the 'verse's mythology- they're not common knowledge, but it's not that surprising in the long run that Will knows about them. And Will doesn't know where the chest is so the Key is largely useless to him; Jones only goes there himself because he thinks (rightly) that Jack has a {[plan}} going on, not because he's worried about Will.
      • The question is, why was he OK with gambling for the key in the first place? When Jones realised that the key was gone, he spent the rest of the movie chasing the heroes, rightly deducing that their next objective was the chest (well, what else could it be), so what was the point? Furthermore, what would've happened if Will had won? As for Jack's gambit, I'm not sure I follow you. Of course, he had a gambit, so what? Jones wanted Jack in his crew. You don't need to be a genius to work out that he will try to weasel out of the deal. Will's interest in the key reinforces that assumption. Why would Jones go along with that?
        • He's not okay with it. He accepts the challenge, perhaps out of arrogance, before the stakes are laid out, and even if there are no rules that say he can't back out, he wouldn't want to look like a pussbox in front of his crew. After he accepts, Will places his soul as his wager, Jones asks "In return for?" and Will says, "I want this," showing him the picture of the key. The look on Jones' face and his tone of voice when he says "How do you know of the key?" makes it clear that he's caught off-guard by this. I don't have the DVD for reference but I think Will even taunts him with a dare to back out, and Jones' response is to show him the actual key to prove he has the balls to go through with the game.
      • Occam's Razor says that Jones was just overconfident- after all, the implication is that no one has successfully challenged or cheated him in centuries. Under those circumstances, anybody might make a sloppy mistake.
      • The Pirates wiki said that he knows everything that goes on in the ship,which is debatable,but it would explain his bet,in other words he's (as they say in Elf) a cotton ninny muggin.
      • The game in question requires each participant to reveal their wager. Will shows his soul easily - he is there. Jones needs to prove that he is in possession of the key or he is unable to play.
  • Following the same scene, isn't a captain's cabin supposed to be guarded, especially when he's asleep?
    • On an ordinary ship, probably. But why would they bother guarding Davy Jones? He's all but invincible, and anything that could kill him would be able to plow through his crew like it was nothing. Besides, nobody is usually aboard but mind-controlled crew members; no reason to even get into the habit.
  • What's the deal with the suspended cages the cannibals were keeping the pirates in? First there is a threat that the supporting vines might snap and their dinner will plummet into the bottomless chasm. Next, each time the tribe wanted a pirate sandwich they had to pull a couple centners of weight out of the said chasm. How is that superior to making a durable wooden cage on the ground and keeping the prisoners there Bound and Gagged? I understand that savage cannibals are not exactly paragons of lucidity, but still.
    • Possibly they had a ritual reason? Or maybe Jack ordered it that way, to create an unusual prison that his crew might be able to escape from (and subsequently free him, of course).
    • Well, the chasm isn't actually bottomless. It has a bottom down there somewhere. If the vines snap the cannibals can just climb down and pick up the gooey remains. If they're lucky there might still be some pieces big enough to barbecue. And hanging the cages over a pit makes it (in theory) that much harder for the prisoners to get away. Even if they squeeze through the bars, there's nowhere to go but down.
    • It also resolves the sanitation problem. Would you want to eat someone who'd been sitting around in a cage in his own filth? This way, they can relieve themselves through the holes in the bottom of the basket.
    • Support of two above, The cage is over a pit because it would have been possible for the captives to attack the rope/joints of the cage to get free. No one is really willing to destroy the cage that is stopping them from falling...
  • In the first film did their clothes get cursed too? I get how the curse makes them into skeletons but the clothes also looked all torn up in the moonlight.
    • The curse seems to extend to whatever they're wearing at the time. There's probably nothing wrong with the clothes in and of themselves, though.
    • Curses in this Verse seem to have ambient cosmetic effects on whatever it is they afflict. Consider how torn-up and decayed the various curse-afflicted ships in the films look: you could go fishing with those sails, they're so full of holes, yet they still remain functional!
  • What's the deal with 663 golden medallions? Does this number hold some significance in Aztec religion? Were the Aztecs trying to make 666 but ran out of gold?
    • Isn't it 882 gold pieces? I always just figured that Cortez demanded a lot of gold, and the Aztecs came up with as much as they could on short notice.
  • A simple thing in the first movie: Norrington wants Jack Sparrow to be hanged, as soon as he discovers the branded "P" on his wrist which says he is a pirate. So we must assume the authorities brand all pirates that they get hold of. But they also hang all pirates they get hold off. Why don't they hang them in the first place, without bothering to brand them at all? If Jack Sparrow was branded, why wasn't he hanged at the same occasion?
    • Pirates were not always treated the same way. Punishments varied by jurisdiction (some colonies were more tolerant than others) and especially by time period. For a long time the British government not only tolerated but encouraged privateers to attack foreign merchant vessels. But once the Royal Navy was built and the Brits could control the waters themselves they started cracking down hard on piracy of all kinds, even the pirates they themselves had funded. It could be posited that the flashback at the beginning of the first movie when Norrington first states his desire to see all pirates hanged takes place during the tail end of the pro-piracy days. The fact that Norrington states his intent to see all pirates hanged suggests they weren't all being hanged at that time and he intends to change that. Jack could have been branded but not hanged during this time. The later scene after Norrington is made Commodore takes place after British naval policy has shifted from a pro-piracy to anti-piracy stance (hell, Norrington may have helped spearhead the anti-pirate campaign in the PotC universe). Norrington now has command of a powerful warship (the Dauntless), the authority to enforce the law in the waters around Port Royal, and a willing political ally in Governor Swan who is clearly no fan of pirates either (he is, after all, the one who orders Jack hanged).
    • What's more, the mark could indicate that Jack was caught and sentenced to be hanged at one point, but he escaped. Even just running on the movie's logic, it'd make sense to brand pirates so they can be easily recognized if they somehow escape, or get rescued by the rest of their crew. Norrington has no problem with immediately executing Jack because the brand showed he was already tried and sentenced to death.
    • Though it could just be a policy of the East India Trading Co. to mark any traitorous privateers working for them as pirates as a form of punishment, as suggested by by Norrington's remark that Jack had "had a brush with the East India Trading Co." and the later reveal that Cutler Beckett, head of the company, had branded Jack for a misdeed to said company.
  • The Flying Dutchman can go underwater. Yet when she surfaces (as demonstrated early in the the third movie) she can immediately start to fire her cannons. -- How do they keep the powder dry?
    • Same way the ship doesn't sink? Voodoo magic.
    • The Dutchman is pretty clearly magical down to its keel, anyway- we are talking a ship that was made for the express purpose of sailing souls to the afterlife, after all. None of its abilities should be that surprising, nor need much of an explanation beyond Davy Jones Did It.
  • In the third movie: When the pirates plan to free Calypso from her "human bonds", they lead her unto the deck all tied up in rope. If they are going to free her anyway, why the ropes? As long as she is in her human form, she's not dangerous (she has no intention to stop them anyway) and once she gets her divine powers back, the ropes are pointless.
    • They were probably just trying to be Crazy Prepared. Didn't help at all in this situation, though, as mentioned above- ropes weren't made with angry goddesses in mind.
    • Even when she's human, she's still a voodoo sorceress. Keeping her tied up stops her from escaping prematurely via magic, thus guaranteeing that she'll owe them for voluntarily setting her free.
  • In the first movie Jack explains to Elizabeth that he was rescued from the island by smugglers. Since he was stranded there with nothing but a gun, what exactly did he pay them with? Unless, of course...
    • Jack being Jack, he probably conned them into thinking he could lead them to something valuable if they rescued him and then got away at the first opportunity, or something of that sort. Alternately, they were short a crewman for whatever reason and he offered to fill in, though that's a lot less interesting.
    • Smugglers are still businessmen, and they probably figured that the great Captain Jack Sparrow owing them a favor was a good thing.
      • Or maybe they were just nice smugglers who rescued a marooned man. It's not impossible.
    • Jack was once captain of the Black Pearl, the fastest ship on the sea. IE: exactly the sort of thing smugglers would want. He probably offered them the boat and then ditched them.
    • Perhaps Jack bartered some of his better hair beads. He may have concealed his more-valuable trinkets deep inside his mane, in case he needed some emergency fundage. ('Could be he still has a precious bauble or two hidden in there.)
      • Yeah, there's also the rings he's fond of stealing. He might've had half a dozen or so when he was stranded.
    • People, people: these are rum smugglers we're talking about. Why on Earth wouldn't they rescue one of their very best customers?
      • Plus, they'd want him off the island ASAP so he'll stop drinking their supplies.
  • What happens if you die in the world of the dead? Like that random Red Shirt who got crushed by a falling cannon during the "Up is Down" scene?
    • You go from being a living person in the underworld to a ghost in the underworld. Just being there doesn't automatically make you dead.
      • In other words, if you "die" in the world of the dead you end up stuck there.
  • Why couldn't Elizabeth just join Will's crew on the Dutchman?
    • Because she's not dead. Yet.
      • But the sailors who joined Davy Jones' crew were not dead at the time of joining. When he raided ships, he specifically picked still-living crew members for his own crew, and killed the rest.
        • They were supposed to be either "dead or dying". Remember that Jones was surprised at Will being present during his collection in the second film. And also, the whole 'recruit army of undead' thing is not how the job is supposed to work when it's done properly.
  • Does anyone else think that the story could have been executed just a little better if it were a series of books or a television series not limited by an expected run time of 2.5 hours tops? I just hadt his nagginf feeling that they could have explained/executed several of the plot twists much better or worked out rushed character-development and clarified background story much better if they didn't have to cram a plot into the movies time length.
    • That sort of thing happens when you plot out your film while you're filming.
      • See, I personally never had any trouble following the movies, but I definitely think the franchise would've had less people complaining if it was release in small, weekly bites like Lost. People never seemed to care that Lost was complex as hell and that they were just making it up as they went along -- they couldn't wait for the next episode to come out. I think it's all that waiting and speculating that makes things easier to understand, like how now people say that the first Pirates film was simple and linear when, originally, most people had no freakin' idea what was going on and complained about it in reviews. I'm calling it Back to The Future syndrome, where watching a movie with a complex plot a hundred times renders it simple and timeless.
  • In the first film, there's an establishing shot with Jack in the prison of the moonlight making the cursed pirates look like skeletons. However, it appears as though this shot was during their raid and while Elizabeth was being taken to or already on the dinghy and headed for the Pearl. Wouldn't someone have noticed that the crazed pirates suddenly don't have any skin or muscle or anything? Wouldn't Elizabeth have noticed?
    • Not if the shaft of moonlight was narrow enough. The film makers cheat with stuff like that.
      • Shots of the sky showed it as a very cloudy night. There was only a brief, small break in the clouds for that reveal.
  • In Dead Man's Chest, after the Pearl repels the Kraken in round one with a volley of cannon fire, why doesn't the crew bring her about and make for the shallows? Actually, why doesn't the ship move at all when the Kraken lets go? You can see that the sails are full and that the cephalopodian menace has circled around for another pass, so why doesn't the Pearl budge?
    • Perhaps the crew were simply too stunned from everything that had just happened and weren't thinking clearly- not to mention that their captain had jumped ship, so there was no one around to give the order.
    • They couldn't, the Kraken kinda had them over a barrel. Remember, "must've hit a reef"? It stopped them dead in their track and all the sails in the world wouldn't have helped them.
      • The Kraken did grab the ship to make its first attack, but you can see from the giant wake that the beastie's let go and moved a considerable distance away to make the second attack. Unless the Kraken somehow glued it to the bottom, the Pearl should have started moving once it let go.
  • One from the first film. Jack shoots Barbossa in the heart. "I can't die and you've wasted your shot!" says Barbossa. Then Will mentions he didn't waste it, dropping his blood stained medallion into the chest. After it lands, Barbossa starts to bleed out his heart and die, as does the black pirate on board the Dauntless. Meaning anyone who suffered a fatal wound while cursed is now going to die from that wound. Then why doesn't Jack die from the big gaping stab wound in his stomach?
    • Barbossa and the other pirate died because they were wounded right then, and their supernatural natures hadn't had the chance to fix the damage. Jack's wound had happened several minutes before, and was undone when he stepped out of and into the moonlight.
    • Also, there was a bullet lodged in the middle of what was, now, a beating heart. Kinda makes it hard to pump blood.
      • You notice, Jack and Barbossa went jumping in and out of moonlight throughout the fight. It's almost like a reset for wounds and such, but just standing there is what got Barbossa. If simply being wounded carried over no matter what, the pirates would be swiss cheese after the eventful ten years they'd just had. The rule was probably created just for that scene, like the fact that the cursed pirates were shown to be able to bleed just to explain how they were able to make their blood sacrifices. It's movie logic, you have to accept the rules you're shown, even if there's no greater reason given. Also, Koehler had a sword stuck in him immediately after the curse was lifted, not before.
  • Elizabeth's fighting skills. She goes all the way from damsel in distress in the beginning of the first movie to holding her own with a cutlass against multiple cremembers of the Flying Dutchman in the second to being on par with any main character in the third in terms of fencing. Where did that all come from exactly? Did she stat practicing fencing for three hours a day?
    • She says that Will taught her how to handle a sword, so who's to say he didn't put her on his own training regimen? Besides, she already comported herself pretty well in the Final Battle in Curse of the Black Pearl, so it's not like she was completely helpless before.
  • In the fourth movie near the end, Jack had to stand on a pirate's shoulders to reach the 'portal'. So how is it that all of the pirates made it through? (They should have had to leave one person behind...) not to mention that immediately afterwards, A small British regiment led by Barbossa comes in, then an ENTIRE Spanish army, gear and all manages to go through all at the same time. Flat What
    • Who says ALL of them got through? I didn't keep a count on exactly how many they had with them before and after, but is it possible that some non-important guy got left behind and we just didn't notice because his presence didn't matter? Or, I suppose the last one could have jumped really high, or maybe found something to stand on, then jumped up from that. Or something.
      • My best guess is that the they took turns helping each other up until there were only two of them left. At that point one of them gave the other a leg up... and held on really damn tight so that when guy A gets sucked through the ceiling guy B gets pulled along for the ride.
  • At the end of the fourth film, the chalices are used to transfer life between Angelica and Blackbeard, so that one can live out the years of the other. But at the time they drink from the chalices, both of them are fatally wounded. Wouldn't the "years" transferred therefore be more like "minutes", since each is due to die very shortly?
    • I thought it was all the years they have lived and would have lived would be transferred. So Angelica got all the years Blackbeard was alive and all the years he would have lived.
      • The problem with that is...Blackbeard didn't have any longer to live. It was his fate to be killed by Barbossa, and Barbossa killed him. Angelica should have netted a whole couple of seconds of life from that exchange.
    • Remember the part about All the years he had lived? The guy has lived plenty
        • If I recall correctly, the person with the tear got all the years lived and all the years they would have lived had fate been kinder. Who knows how long Blackbeard could have lived if old Hector hadn't shown up with his poison-toad-sword.
    • Either way, her current lifespan is undoubtedly much shorter than it was before, given how much older than her Blackbeard was.
      • No, no, no. First, you get the person's years added onto yours, not replacing yours. Second, you get all the years they had left, plus all the years they had already lived. You get their full lifespan, from the day they were born to the day they would have died of natural causes in addition to your own full lifespan, again, from the day you were born to the day you would have died of natural causes.
        So in reality, it's probably better to drain the years from someone older, because then you're guaranteed to at the very least get the 60-70 years they'd already lived--for all you know, the strapping 20 year old you'd otherwise drain might be fated to die the next day of an inborn medical condition. I don't see what was confusing about this. They state it about as clear as it could possibly be stated without Barbossa pulling out a blackboard and doing the math for you on screen.
      • Honestly I don't remember him ever saying you got the life they had already lived. It was something like "the rest of their life", which would mean she'd only be getting a few seconds. Maybe I misheard it, I dunno. However, regardless I don't think the Fountain gives one invulnerability, just extended life/youth, so she can still be killed before dear old dad's life is used up. This is made rather explicit when Jack strands her on the island with the pistol. He doesn't think harm will come to her, but it sounds like it's possible.
      • You may not remember it, but yes, they explicitly said you get all the years already lived as well.
  • In the fourth film, we learn that two chalices are needed for the ritual used to make use of the fountain of youth. But why are those two specific chalices necessary? If the fountain is in the new world, then why do they have a Latin inscription on them? Where did Ponce de Leon get them?
    • The chalices were necessary to get to the fountain. After that, it's not like they were carrying extra cups.
    • Probably the bowls of the cups were found by Ponce de Leon, and he had the metalwork (Latin inscription included) added on to them.
  • In the fourth film, what the hell was up with the mermaid-naming scene? I mean, it would be one thing if she told priest-whose-name-isn't-important-enough-to-remember her name in that pause, but he just up and declares that this is her name? I mean, how arrogant is that, did you consider that she might have actually had a name before you declared it?
    • It's just meant to establish his attachment to her, and in all fairness she didn't speak up.
    • The only named mermaid is the Queen of Mermaids Tamara. Perhaps names in mermaid culture don't really work like they do to us and only the most important mermaids got names.
    • Phillip glances quite deliberately at the mermaid after saying she has a name; he names her Syrena only after she doesn't volunteer one. It's possible she simply didn't have a personal name, as mentioned above, and if she did, the name of a supernatural being often carries power (usually power over the being itself) in folklore. If that's the case here, she definitely wasn't going to let it slip where Blackbeard, an Evil Sorcerer, might hear.
    • Honestly to me it just seemed like righteous indignation/fury made him jump the gun. She hadn't said a name up to that point and he just wanted her to be treated with kindness. Right after he said it there was a pause and I thought it would have been hilarious if he'd gone "Uh...what's your name?" but he didn't. He just ended up making up a name for her on the spot since she wasn't volunteering anything and she went with it.
      • You also have to remember that, all kindness aside, this guy is a missionary, and as such, arrogance is sort of par for the course. He believes, beyond all doubt, that he's right and everyone who disagrees with him is dead wrong, and that he's going to travel the world saving heathens from themselves. Arrogant characters are more fun, but not they're not exactly headscratchers.
  • In the fourth film, why did the Spanish go to all the trouble of tracking down the Fountain of Youth in the New World if they had no desire to use it? If that *was* their plan all along, why did they bother to find the chalices? And why bother polishing them? Why not destroy them as soon as they acquired them?
    • Didn't you listen to the guy's speech? They sought it out because they wanted to destroy it. Eternal life isn't something man is meant to have.
    • That was sort of the original poster's point; they're out to destroy the Fountain, so why do they bother going and getting the chalices first? And once they have them, why do they bother polishing them and keeping them safe, as opposed to destroying them immediately? After all, as soon as they got them back from [whoever ended up with them after the Mexican Standoff], they just stamp on them and throw them into the water. If that was their intention all along, why wait?
    • The chalices were the keys to the fountain. (Remember Jack standing in the cave, holding them together and reciting the words.) The Spanish didn't just want to destroy the keys, they wanted to destroy the fountain itself, so they needed to keep them. Granted there was no way to be sure that they'd need the chalices to get there, but at that point nobody knew.
    • Yes, but he was just reading off of them. Standing there waving them around did nothing. He hadn't noticed the inscription until that point in time. The Spanish had already seen the inscription, so why did the need the chalices anymore. More to the point if the chalices are the keys, why not just destroy them, thusly locking away the Fountain for good, and then just return home?
    • There's no guarantee those specific chalices are necessary to make the fountain work. They were needed to get to the fountain, so they kept them. Also, they hadn't finished cleaning up the inscription at the time. The guy was still working when Jack and Barbossa first stole the cups, at which point they were probably more worried about thieves.
    • Also, the Spanish leader was a Large Ham. He wanted everyone to know they were destroying the Fountain in God's name.
    • The Spaniards knew that Barbossa was also coming for the Fountain, and that he needed the chalices for the immortality-ritual. Even if the cups had turned out not to be necessary to reach their destination, they were still useable as bait to lure the competing English expedition into a trap.
    • They didn't destroy the chalices as soon as they got their hands on them because the chalices weren't the real target--the Fountain was. Even if they destroyed the way to get in, as long as the Fountain itself was untouched, there was still a possibility of someone using a metaphorical back door somehow to access it. These guys were on a holy mission in the name of God and country to destroy the "pagan temple"--that's not a job you just leave half-assed, not with that level of devotion to the cause. (Though I still don't get why they were lovingly polishing the chalices up at the camp. They had Ponce de León's notes, so couldn't they have just gotten the inscription from them?)
    • My theory as to the polishing is that they didn't originally intend to destroy the chalices, only the Fountain itself, without which the chalices are just fancy cups- they probably intended to take the chalices back to Spain and the king as a sort of souveneir/proof. However, when they found the pirates and British at the fountain, the Spaniard decided to destroy the chalices both to keep anyone from managing to quickly use the fountain while everyone is distracted, and to make their point dramatically.
  • What happens to Jack's hat at the end of OST?
    • Still on the island. He dropped it fighting the Spaniards as I recall.
    • And why does he not make a big deal about it? His not going back for it was a big deal in Dead Man's Chest, why not here as well?
    • Actually, he lost it when he and Angelica dove into the water to escape the British soldiers. Almost as soon as he climbed back out of the water, he was hit with a dart and knocked out. By the time he wakes up on Blackbeard's ship, his hat is a long way away. For the rest of the movie, Captain Jack was hatless. I have little doubt that his hat will find him again someday, though.
  • How did the mermaids learn English? Doesn't seem like they'd be able to use it underwater...
    • They're predators that hunt humans. Stand to reason that they'd learn the language in order to hunt more effectively. They can also walk on land.
    • The mermaids have something of an accent, implying that they have their own language.
  • Where and when did Ponce de Leone gain access to magic? I mean, are we supposed to assume he just found a pair of fountain-of-youth chalices and a reanimating map?
    • Probably around the same time he ended up getting his ship stuck on top of a cliff. As for the main point, Blackbeard has a magic sword that controls his and other ship, not to mention his quite literal ships in bottles. I think you're supposed to assume the setting is a bit more fantastic.
    • Yeah; while you'd be unlikely to just find a wizard for hire on the streets of London, magic and the supernatural clearly exist in the POTC-verse if you know where to look for it. Jack and Barbossa know, Blackbeard and Beckett knew, and it's not much of a stretch that Ponce de Leon did as well.
    • According to legend (probably not actually true, but it fits in with the setting) Ponce de Leon was searching for the Fountain of Youth when he discovered Florida. If he really did spend time searching for the Fountain then he presumably learnt all the lore about it. The chalices were probably in some lost temple or other that he visited before setting off for the island, the pirates just get told they're on Ponce's ship because that's their last known location.
  • At the end of Stranger Tides, Why does Jack bother performing the ritual as well as a pretty sweet Batman Gambit to save Angelica only to strand her on an island the same way Barbossa had stranded him? Both she and Blackbeard were going to die from poison sword wounds anyway. Sure Jack's not the nicest guy in the world, but this felt like an excessive dog kicking.
    • Weren't you listening? He said that it was a well travelled route, so ships were bound to go by. All she would need to do is start a fire to get their attention. He stranded her there because she would have killed him otherwise. So no, he is not dumping her there to die.
      • Yeah he gives her step by step instructions on how to survive and get help.
  • I'm afraid to ask this since I think I know the answer, but... What happened to the crew of the Black Pearl after Blackbeard captured it?
    • Hopefully they're on the Pearl like the monkey.
  • Why didn't they show us what happened to the cleric after he went with the mermaid? Seriously, I really was surprised that they didn't even give us a hint! Did she eat him? Did he turn into a mer-person? Is he doing whatever it is that Mermaids do with men to get pregnant? Is he singing annoying songs with Sabastian and Flounder? I know the guy was kind of a side character, but throw us a bone here!
    • They might be setting us up for the next film - maybe he's the new king of the sea?
    • Also, why did she spare him at all in White Cap Bay? How did she know he was "different" from the other men in the dinghies she had just been trying to eat?
    • She didn't spare him, she just said that she did. It isn't clear what she was going to do to him before Jack's explosion knocked her down. As far as I'm concerned, she dragged him down and made him a lovely dinner... if you know what I mean.
    • I suspect they deliberately left it ambiguous so you could imagine the ending that pleases you most. If you're sentimental and want to believe she turned him into a mermaid and they lived happily ever after, you can do that. If you're cynical and think she was like all the other mermaids and ate him, you can do that. If you're a sucker for romantic tragedies and think she really did love him, but that her answer to his "Can you forgive me?" was "No", you can do that too.
      • I imagine this is exactly what they're going for. They didn't want to spoon feed us an answer and left it deliberatel ambiguous, and I doubt we'll hear more about them in future movies. Personally I want to know how he'd survive regardless. It's said a Mermaid's Kiss can save one from drowning, but he also had a pretty serious wound to go with it, and having it exposed to swamp water probably didn't help. But then, she just said she could "save him" which is pretty vague. Maybe she can heal him somehow. Or maybe she's saving him from life and just eating him. Who knows?
    • They cut off one of the pirates who was rambling about mermaids, and it sounded like one of the things they can supposedly do has something to do with saving someone from death. Or, Syrena might know where the source of the fountain is, and she might've given her life to save his.
  • Why did Barbossa tear up the privateers charter at the end of OST? I understand the whole "Free men! Life on the sea! Yoo-ho!" routine, but that charter gave him a free pass to do whatever he felt like, protected by the crown. He could have raided ships and plunder treasure for the rest of his life, as long as they weren't English ships. Why did he destroy his "Get Out of Jail Free" Card? They hang captured pirates, as the films have made abundantly clear.
    • Well, Barbossa didn't complete the mission he'd been signed on for- claiming the Fountain of Youth for Britain- and got a navy ship destroyed and most if not all of its crew killed to boot. I doubt he had much of a future with Britain anyway. Besides, Barbossa may be willing to work with just about anyone to advance his own agenda, but he doesn't seem to have any more love when it comes down to it for the colonial powers than Jack.
    • Besides, he now has the power to remotely control all ships within his sight. He doesn't need the protection of the British Empire anymore.
  • How were Commodore Norrington and Governor Swan so easily... shall we say... neutered by the East India Company? Anyone that high up in the military or political ranks in those days surely had very influential friends, and one would think they would have put up more of a fight. (Truth be told, it was disappointing if not depressing to see the only two good, honorable authority figures in His Majesty's service defeated by a villain that didn't qualify as a Worthy Opponent or a Magnificent Bastard; Norrington and Swan deserved better.)
    • Norrington was lower than Beckett, so he had to do what he was told, sadly. Swan I'm a bit confused on, to admit. Perhaps Beckett convinced the King that Swan was a traitor for helping Elizabeth escape so that he could push him around.
    • Even if Governor Swan had a lot of friends back in Britain, they were a looooong way away, with no means of knowing what's happening in the Caribbean except what turns up in the occasional trans-Atlantic letter. Beckett could easily use bribery or coercion to cut the Governor's lines of communication with the Crown, then send a message to London that Swan had died of natural causes after having him killed.
    • Firstly, Beckett had something on his side that was like kryptonite to Swann and Norrington, and that was the fate of Elizabeth. Now, as far as the EITC knew, she was aboard the Pearl when it sank and Beckett assumed she was dead, but he continued pretending to look for her, all the while privately threatening Swann that he would kill Elizabeth with all the other pirates if Swann didn't become his stooge. Also, Norrington just made a selfish, stupid mistake- he did what's expected of him so he could have his life back, no questions asked.
  • Right at the beginning of the movie, that one guard who was chasing Jack.. why did he put his sword and gun down? You're chasing down a pirate escaping from the king. Was he afraid he was going to get his sword dirty?
    • Weren't those Jack's "effects" he was carrying (at least, Jack steals them back immediately)? He probably put them down to have his hands free to use his own weapon(s).
  • Is that hat that Barbossa got at the end of On Stranger Tides a new one? Or did Blackbeard take Barbossa's hat as a souvenir after defeating the Black Pearl?
    • It's a new hat, it just look a hell of a lot like his original.
  • Re-watching At World's End, I might've come up with a solution to a recurring headscratcher: why Elizabeth and Will absolutely cannot meet during the ten years. At the end, the Dutchman disappears in the green flash, presumably back to the land of the dead. I took that to mean that the seas Will must travel are the ones in the Underworld, not the mortal seas of Earth. He can't come back to the land of the living at 'all for ten years, or he's not doing his job and he ends up walking Tentacle Porn like Jones did.
    • I thought that he was allowed to come to the mortal seas, but only to pick up the dead. So unless Elizabeth starts sailing the seven seas killing everyone she meets just to see her husband, it's for one day every ten years.
  • In On Stranger Tides, why is Mr. Cotton's parrot still alive in the "Black Pearl" in a bottle? I understand Jack the Monkey, but why the parrot?
    • We don't know enough about how the process works to tell. Maybe the parrot survived the battle and simply got caught up in the spell?
    • Maybe the whole crew is alive in the bottle!!
    • What I'm worried about is we don't know how long it's been like that. Jack the Monkey is undead and the parrot doesn't need as much food as a human, but how do we know the crew haven't all starved to death? They don't have unlimited stores.
      • I don't think Blackbeard would've left the crew alive.
  • The "profane ritual" was obviously established long before Christianity ever came to the Americas. Therefore, how the hell is it that it requires silverware made in Europe?
    • Do we really know where the chalices came from? The Latin inscription might have been added later, and/or isn't actually Latin, but rather appears as whatever language the viewer percieves as being "mystical". Alternately, Ponce de Leon had the chalices made as part of an effort to make the Fountain more controllable, but it is usable (just unreliable) without them.
    • It doesn't seem that it's the specific chalices that govern the ritual, but rather their origin- chalices given by a king, specifically. Kingship is often given a spiritual role as well as temporal leadership in many local religious traditions of the ancient world. Presumably chalices given by a chieftain would allow the ritual to work just as well.
      • As to how the latin inscription opens the door, I figured after much thought that perhaps one need only say "water of life" in some language they understand (remember, Jack knows at least a little Latin and Spanish, and probably knows something as common as that).
    • The ritual isn't necessarily something ancient. Like with the Gold of Cortes from the first film, it could be something fairly recent- notice the chalices required come from Ponce de León. Perhaps he was the first to discover a way to unlock the fountain's potential and, through him, it's been unlocked ever since. Or maybe the fountain used to be easier to take advantage of, but the actions of de León inspired the powers to create new obstacles. He could've abused the fountain and killed thousands to gain immortality -- showing arrogance before the gods in a way that draws their fire. You notice the ultimate fate of Ponce de León in the film? That doesn't look like a guy the gods smiled on.
  • The "up is down" scene. I still don't get it. What was the plan? Why did it work?
    • The plan was to turn the ship over. It worked because it seems to be one of those apparently arbitrary metaphysical rules governing going to/from a supernatural place like the underworld.
    • But what actually happened to the ship once it got turned over? It seemed to travel up through a finite volume of water and emerge on its "opposite" surface. Is Earth flat in the POTC-verse, with the underworld on its other side?
    • I simply saw it as more of a symbolic representation of travelling between worlds than anything. In a supernatural sense the underworld may be on the other side, but I doubt it's literally on the other side. Savvy?
    • It's magic, guys. It doesn't need to have a feasible explanation.
      • No, but as for why it was put in the film in the first place, the makers may have drawn inspiration from how mirrors and reflections were historically thought of as important, even magical. Think of all the stories about magic mirrors, for example. At sea, the whole ship can be reflected in the water, and flipping things over at the time of the green flash could flip other things around too, like upside-down to the right way up, and dead to living. Like the post above said, it was symbolic.
  • Are Jack and Barbossa friends? This isn't too bad of a headscratcher, and I've come up with my own theory, but I want to know what other people think, because their relationship is odd.
    • They're enemies who respect one another and are willing to team up whenever something that threatens both of them comes down the pipe, so they can go back to their private feuding in peace.
      • That seems logical. They way I always thought of it was that they were as close to being friends as two pirates of their sort could be, but I like your theory as well.
      • They were definitely enemies in the first film, but it appears Jack's killing Barbossa (even temporarily) has settled the score. In the scene beside the dead Kracken, they recognize their common situation (being pirates in a world they don't entirely fit into anymore), so by OST they've become Vitriolic Best Buds... or at least frenemies.
  • Barbossa said the rigging of the Pearl tied him up, so he cut off his bound leg. Why didn't he cut the ropes? (Not to ruin a totally awesome moment for ol' Hector of course, but I'm just wondering)
    • We don't know all the details, so he very well may have tried. Maybe he cut the first few ropes but more came, giving him no choice but to make a Life or Limb Decision.
      • But what would have stopped the ropes from picking him up again...?
    • The ropes may have been magically-enhanced, considering Blackbeard was controlling them. Alternately, if the ropes were around his ankle, he might not have been able to get a good chopping angle at them; the rigging lines on ships of the time were surprisingly tough and able to resist cutting.
  • How would the Fountain of Youth have helped Blackbeard against Barbossa? If my understanding is correct, then the fountain merely extends your lifespan. It doesn't make you invincible -a sword to the heart would still have killed Blackbeard. They do mention using Barbossa as the sacrifice, but that means their plan essentially boils down to "let's kill him before he kills you" and they could have tried that with a gun rather than the fountain.
    • The Fountain healed Angelica from being poisoned; it clearly has regenerative properties. They probably figured that Barbossa was fated to do whatever he was going to do to Blackbeard, but that they could then undo it with the Fountain. Would have worked out that way, too, if Jack hadn't switched the chalices.
    • Also, they probably thought "pagan mystic fountain" would be better at trumping Fate than a gun would. Presumably, however Blackbeard ended up "facing" Barbossa, Barbossa was going to kill him because Fate said so. Angelica mentions that the Fountain would give you all the years used by the sacrifice, and all the years they would've had "if fate had been kinder," so it's implied the Fountain's water has the power to outright change someone's fate.
  • The mermaids in On Stranger Tides don't have nipples, but they have breasts. So what are they? Mammals or fish (or something in between)?
    • They're a magical creature that needn't obey the laws of science and reality. As to why they may have breast but no nipples, perhapse the breast make them more appealling to thier choice of prey, Horny Sailors.
    • They might have nipples under the Godvia Hair.
      • No, you see several times beneath the hair. Though admittedly, that in mermaid form, and there were scales to cover up. Maybe they have nipples when in human form (no scales)?
        • You're grasping at straws. The reason you don't see visible nipples is because in combination with the rest of the film's content, that would have been enough to up its rating. There's nothing thematic about it.
  • So in the first film, it's said that none of the Black Pearl's crew can taste or feel. However, many times in the film, crew members react as if in pain (Bomb Dude getting hit by Will's thrown axe, Pintel being smashed in the face with a bedwarmer). What if the curse prevents them from feeling things like a woman's flesh and the sea spray, but not things that would hurt or otherwise have some sort of negative effect on them? Hey, if you're going to put a curse on something, might as well go all the way with it, eh? Anyone else think this is plausible?
    • Pretty sure I've seen Word of God backing this up; while cursed, Barbossa and co. don't feel pleasurable sensations, but they can feel pain.
      • If it is so, then it's pretty darn inconsistent. Neither Barbossa, not Ragetty (or was it Pintel?) showed any signs of pain when they were stabbed/shot respectively.
      • It's possible that their sense of pain, while present, is dulled even in human form. Also, Barbossa seems to have been expecting Elizabeth to attack him, and so would have steeled himself against it, while Pintel was more shocked that Barbossa shot him than anything.
  • What was with that whole "First to the finish" thing between Barbossa and Jack in AWE?
    • What exactly are you referring to?
      • It's during the sandbar meeting. Right after he slashes the 'piece of eight' off Jack's bandanna, Barbossa snarls, "If you have somethin' to say, I might be sayin' something as well." To which Jack replies, "First to the finish, then?"
        • That's the one. I have no idea what they're talking about. Any ideas?
          • My guess is, they're letting each other know, in code, that each now intends to pursue his own scheme to defeat the armada; Barbossa by freeing Calypso, Jack by trying to stab Jones' heart. "So we'll just see whose idea works better!"
  • In the end of AWE Sparrow holds Davy Jones' heart at a blade point, so Jones... stabs Will. What was that supposed to achieve, and how was that supposed to prevent Jack from stabbing the heart? Did he just want to Take Will With Him?
    • Pure sadism and spite on Jones' part was how I always saw the scene.
    • Kinda answered your own question. Yeah, he was trying to take out Will with him. It was also a final 'fuck you' to Jack Sparrow. Though I have a lot of other problems with that scene. Why didn't Davy Jones even try to wrestle the heart from Jack's hand? Jack already had the heart at blade point, so it's not like Davy had anything to lose by that point. Further more, Jack has the fucking heart at blade point. Why didn't he just stab it while he had the chance, and instead gloated like an idiot?
    • It was more than just trying to take Will out with him. Jones was giving Jack a choice: stab the heart, be immortal, watch your friend die because you were selfish. The only way to save Will would be to do what they did: get him to stab the heart instead. To do that, Jack would have to get past Jones, and even if he did, he'd be giving up his only chance at the immortality and freedom he really wanted. Jones just didn't count on a) Bootstrap jumping on his back, and b) Jack deciding Will's life was too valuable.
    • Moreover, it's a call-back to Jones's previous conversation with Jack, about whether or not Jack could live with knowing he'd consigned Will to bondage. At the time, Jack was dismissive of the idea that he'd feel so guilty about such a thing as to make life unbearable, but forcing him to actually watch Will being killed in cold blood -- killed, because Jack had told Jones that Will was in love -- is Jones's way of calling Jack's bluff about that. It's the inverse of his usual "Do you fear death?" question, recast for would-be immortal Jack as "Do you fear an eternity of living with this guilt?"
    • Jack had to blow his chance, 'cause it was William Turner's destiny to become the Captain of the Flying Dutchman. What can one little pirate do against that?
    • As to why didn't Jack stab the heart right away, and why did Johnes try to take it away. Remember, that Jack wasn't eager to become the captain of the FD. I presume he wanted to threaten Johnes into submission without having to condemn himself. Johnes apparently understood that and therefore didn't attempt to confront Jack directly, but instead resorted to the abovementioned gambit with Will.
  • After all the other supernatural things we've seen, I know we're just supposed to go with it. But did they even try to explain how Blackbeard became a powerful sorceror?
    • Magic works in the POTC-verse, as has been clear ever since we saw a certain crew of cursed pirates way back in the first movie. At some point, Blackbeard learned to use it. While it would've been interesting to learn the how and why behind that, the above is the only explanation that's absolutely neccessary. (Now, if this was an otherwise realistic pirate series, it would be a different story entirely).
    • There's a bit of Truth in Television there, since the real life Edward Teach/ Blackbeard claimed to be a Dark Arts practitioner (though it's possible he just spread that rumor to make his reputation even scarier- he was good at that.)
  • In DMC, why didn't Jack just let Will stab the heart? I know that he wanted to call off the Kraken, but if the person who kills Jones becomes the new captain, couldn't Will just call off the beastie post-Jones murder? Unless the protagonists discovered that part of the curse/story between DMC and AWE, although it's not really discussed how they find out.
    • Perhaps it was unknown whether any FD captain could control the beastie, or just Jones, and Jack didn't want to take the risk. A bereaved Kraken at large could have wrecked all kinds of havoc.
    • The protagonists don't seem to know in DMC- they only seem to learn after encountering Governor Swann's ghost in AWE. He found out from someone in the EITC, and they probably found out between movies (Beckett probably forced Jones to divulge everything he knew about the properties of his heart and the chest, and I've always been of the opinion that Swann was told by Beckett's then-Dragon, Norrington). In other words, as far as Jack knows at this point, killing Jones will break the power of the Dutchman and leave the kraken free to continue the rampage its master set it on, with no-one else able to control it.
  • Why didn't Cutler Beckett just take the Endeavour and go after Jack and the compass? It's demonstrated that the EITC has incredible naval power, what's keeping them from using it? Since everyone he's recruited has proven less than trustworthy (i.e. Elizabeth threatening him and escaping thereby nullifying Will's reasons for retrieving the compass, Will deciding he'd rather just stab the thing), wouldn't it be a better idea to send Mercer and a crew of ultraloyal soldiers to fetch the thing?
    • Beckett's probably already tried that, and found Jack to be extremely elusive. So he decided to try sending someone with 'insider access'. It didn't work, but Beckett had other plots to fall back on- he probably always had a dozen schemes going at once.
    • Besides, Jack has a lot of experience evading the Royal Navy and EITC. Sending a fleet after him won't turn him up; you need to be able to out-think him, which is what Beckett appears to have been trying.
    • Being a ship-of-the-line, the Endeavour wasn't meant to sail around chasing down pirates -- it had a stupid amount of firepower, but little speed and poor maneuverability. It was repeatedly stated and demonstrated throughout the trilogy that no ship could outrun the Black Pearl; even the Flying Dutchman could only beat her with a headwind. Turning someone Jack trusted to the side of the EITC was much more likely to work.
  • Word of God says that in the first movie, Will is the best swordsman, Norrington and Barbossa are tied for second place, and Jack is the worst. How is someone who practices with non-moving objects a better swordsman than a seasoned pirate and a veteran officer of the Royal Navy? Does that mean if I practiced kung-fu techniques three hours a day every day, I could kick Jet Li's ass?
    • Will is mechanically the best swordsman, but how often does he actually win his fights (when not up against Mooks)? Besides, it's entirely possible he has a sparring partner (or more than one) and we just don't see them because this person/people is ultimately irrelevant to the story.
      • He would've beaten Jack if Jack hadn't cheated -- as both of them understood. I don't recall him actually fighting either Barbossa or Norrington except for the three-way in the second film, so no direct comparisons are possible. About a possible sparring partner: it would stand to reason that his partner/s would be of equal skill with a blade, so wouldn't Will have wanted to bring him along? Besides, the way people interact with him makes it seem like nobody really gives two copper pieces about Will, so it's doubtful that anyone was willing to spar three hours a day with him.
      • You make the exact point; Jack cheats. So will just about everybody else. Will falls for that sort of thing. That makes them, effectively, more dangerous than Will, even if he'd beat them in a fair duel where everyone had to follow the rules. Disregard what I said about sparring partner(s); we know nothing about Will's training other than that he does it, so such a person is hypothetical at best.
    • How do we know Will only practices against non-moving objects? We've never actually seen him practice.
      • Will is a blacksmith. Practice or no practice, he's probably a lot stronger than (lazy) Jack or (upper-crust) Norrington, simply because he's spent so many years pounding on hot metal with hammers. Barbossa might be in Will's league in terms of muscle-power, but he's somewhat older than the others and perhaps tires faster when he's not being undead.
        • Which, BTW, raises another headscratcher. THIS flimsy-looking refined boy is an accomplished blacksmith? O'RLY? In the beginning of the first movie, when Will delivers the sword, and the governor asks him to "pass his compliments on to the master", I can understand the confusion - he looked like a delivery boy, not a craftsmen.
          • The "compliments to your master" bit was because Governor Swann knew Will was an apprentice, you know, a student. He didn't think Will was advanced enough to create such a masterpiece.
  • Something that bothered me in OST--Jack frequently speaks in the first movie about how mutiny is the worst crime any man could commit, that the deepest circle of hell is reserved for traitors and mutineers, etc. etc., and yet he goes ahead and stages a mutiny in OST. Granted, he doesn't think Blackbeard is really there, but it's still a mutiny. It just seems out of character, even for him.
    • See, I didn't think it was that out of character. Consistency and Jack don't go together very well and he is endlessly opportunistic, so the way I see it is that he was just bitter about having been mutinied against and marooned, so he makes it seem like the worst thing in the history of piracy, but when a mutiny would serve his purposes, it's perfectly fine. In short, Jack is a hypocrite and a liar, both of which are very much in character.
    • Remember one thing: mutiny is considered the worst crime one can commit, but usually you have a crew that signed on willingly and decided to betray their captain for their own benefit. Barbossa and the crew tried to cut Sparrow out because they were greedy, not because they were particularly dissatisfied. By and large, the crew of the Queen Anne's Revenge were press-ganged into service, and Jack was convinced they were being played by a charlatan. He just unfortunately turned out to be wrong. When you've got a crew of slaves which isn't getting jack (no pun intended) out of the deal, it's less a mutiny and more of a revolt.
  • So, what was up with Ponce de Leon anyway? Did we ever get any indication as to why he was, you know, some sort of skeleton thing? It just seemed sort of there.
    • I think it was just there to be eerie, mystical, and unexplained. My guess would be that he messed with the Fountain in some way and whatever god/spirit/force controls is punished him for it.
      • Fair enough, I was just wondering if I missed anything my fellow tropers picked up on.
  • Are we really supposed to buy Serena's story? Mermaids in the pirates universe are not nice girls who sing happy songs. They are such vicious killers that even bad ass pirates intentionally avoid. Sure Barbossa was there to capture a mermaid that still doesn't make what the mermaids did anything remotely close to self-defense. Regardless of what she claims it's more likely that she was attacking him and it just happened to save his life than it was that she was actually saving him. It just annoys me that they expect us to buy that the mermaid they captured happens to be the one good mermaid in all the world and not a pretty girl taking advantage of a young man's naivety.
    • Well, she did cry legitimate tears of joy when she saw he was alive, which would indicate she felt real affection for him. Whether she'd honestly tried to save his life from the get-go or if it was just because he was the only person there who was remotely kind to her, we don't really have the information to say (not being privy to her thoughts and all).
    • The guy falling in love with a mermaid I can understand, but a mermaid falling in love with a human, who any other day would basically be a regular food source to her? It's like falling in love with a sandwich.
      • A "sandwich" that can express emotion, show affection for you, act concerned for your wellbeing, and so on. It's more like someone becoming attached to a pig or cow... sometimes the people that do so actually do elect to spare said bit of livestock, and some even go so far as swearing off meat altogether. And that's without even being able to have the pig or cow talk to you.
  • So, is Angelica really the Blackbeard's daughter or not? The film didn't make it clear enough to me.
    • Yes, she is. She was willing to die for him, remember? If she wasn't his daughter, why would she do that?
      • If she believes she is. That she believes she is doesn't prove she is.
    • It's teased near the beginning that she's not, but for the bulk of their interactions it's made pretty clear that, at the very least, she believes it and he believes it. I suppose it's possible that she's not, but from what I took out of it Blackbeard and Angelica are indeed father and daughter.
    • We know that Angelica sincerely believes that Blackbeard is her father. Blackbeard either believes or doesn't, either interpretation is supported. She may or may not actually be his daughter, again either interpretation is supported. Without some magical 18th-century equivalent of a DNA test, there's no way to know for sure. However, whether she is or isn't is ultimately irrelevant to the story. All that's really required for the story to function is that she believe it, and she clearly does. Whether Blackbeard does or not is also irrelevant... either he's evil enough to sacrifice his own daughter, or he's evil enough to play on some poor girl's belief to get her to sacrifice herself for him, and both are entirely in keeping with his character.
  • If Davy Jones wanted his heart-chest safe from mortals, why not just bury it deep underwater where nobody could possibly get it (with the technology of the time, that is)? Or at least under something more secure than two feet of sand and a box full of old papers.
    • Ah, but was Jones really hiding the chest from his enemies, or was he putting the heart in a place where he wouldn't have to deal with it? Remember, this is the man (er, squid) who called his heart "that infernal thing", and his motive for tearing it out in the first place wasn't to make himself immortal, but to make himself unable to feel.
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