The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Though John Carter of Mars appears prominently in the first issue of the second volume, his love interest Dejah Thoris apparently dies before the story starts (it's implied that she was killed by the Molluscs). But then John Carter's children, Prince Carthoris and Princess Tara, are also never seen or mentioned. So then...were they never born in this universe?
    • This might be referring to the end of The Gods of Mars in which Dejah Thoris is imprisoned in a room that can only be opened once a year.
    • It's never explicitly stated that Dejah Thoris is dead. Or, if you like, perhaps she is dead, and what killed her killed the kids as well.
  • Does it bother anyone else that Nemo does basically nothing for the entire series, yet is still considered a full flegeded member of the team. He goes out to help once, gets mistaken for a servant, and then spends the rest of the mission adamantly refusing to carry his own weight. The only help he brings to the table are all his cool toys, and if the League had enough clout to not only identify Nemo AND goad him into working for them (a pretty damn impressive task, if 20,000 Leagues is to be believed) you'd think they'd be able to reverse engineer most of it, or find someone else with similar tech who was more of a team player.
    • I was kind of bothered by that too, and it seemed to me that Moore maybe didn't know whether he wanted to deconstruct Nemo or present him in basically the same way as the source material, and so the end result is that Nemo doesn't really mesh with other characters. It's kind of odd too since Ozymandius of course of Watchmen is a great deconstruction of your "Ra's al Ghul" type of Affably Evil Well-Intentioned Extremist / Omnicidal Maniac of which Nemo is kind of the original.
      • Okay let me think
      • 1- Nemo saves Mina and Quatermain from being lynched by the locals in Cairo
      • 2- Nemo provides the league both with transport and a HQ (the Nautilus)
      • 3- Nemo recovers the other league members from the Thames following their escape from Fu Manchu's lair
      • 4- Nemo figures out that something is wrong with M and dispatches Griffin to investigate, thus revealing Moriarty's involvement.
      • 5- Based on Griffin's intel, Nemo deduces Moriarty's plan (note that Mina, the team leader, and the one who usually figures this sort of thing out stares dumbfounded during this)
      • 6- Nemo provides the balloon, harpoon-machine guns and general battle-plan for the league's assault on Moriarty's airship.
      • 7- Said harpoon-machine gun, combined with Nemo's hatred of all things English makes him even more effective in slaughtering Mooks during the climactic battle of volume 1 than the superstrong, Nigh Invulnerable Edward Hyde (an awed Quatermain notes that "Nemo's worse than Hyde.")
      • 8- Throughout most of volume 2, Nemo's Nautilus is the only thing Britain has that fights the Martian tripods on an even field, and probably would have been successful in holding them of, had Griffin not explained the concept of a submarine to the Martians, leading to them deploying the red-weed to cripple it.
      • So yeah, Nemo pretty much did nothing...
    • Nemo's stereotypical Indian appearance, and he works for the BRITISH EMPIRE generally voluntarily. I just can't get over with this massive contradiction with 20,000 Leagues.
      • I'm not sure what you mean by that. MILLIONS of Indians worked for the British Empire. The only contradiction is between Nemo's stated goals (i.e. the destruction of the British Empire) and what he actually does (i.e. he ends up working for the country he has vowed to destroy).
        • Except he spends much of the time complaining about it, uses the opportunity in the first volume to destroy as many Englishmen as possible, and notes several times that he is in it purely for his own survival. The fact that he quits without wanting to hear any explanations or excuses at the end of Volume 2 also hints that he had been wanting to for quite some time - Hyde's brutality and the Empire use of disease weaponry were the final straws.
          • Confirmed in the most recent series as we learn he's been raising his daughter to carry on where he left off. In the end it turns out she's WORSE, though with what she's been through you could argue the people she went after had it coming.
  • What's the deal with that scene in volume one, where the league is sitting around a table in the Nautilus and everybody but Jekyll is smoking? Why are they all smoking there, when there is no indication that any of them smoke anywhere else in the entire series?
    • Deliberate Values Dissonance. When a Victorian character sits and thinks, he or she lights up. Sherlock Holmes' pipe is simply the most notable example -- and as far as Watson was concerned, it was notable only because of his foul-smelling Turkish tobacco. Remember, this was the era when smoking was compulsory for students at some schools.
    • Griffin and Quartermain are seen smoking in several other scenes. Nemo is smoking a cigar and its likely that like many other cigar smokers he only smokes occasionally. Murray is shown smoking during the Black Dossier.
  • Griffin. Crazy yes. But he never struck me as suicidally crazy. Yet he willingly sides with a species seeking to wipe out mankind, assuming that they'll let him live when they no longer need him? If he was playing both sides against the other it would make sense but he ONLY helps the Martians. And makes his treachery very obvious when he attacks Mina but lets her live. You'd really think he'd have been a bit smarter about the way he went about things.
    • Thinking really isn't his strong point. Remember how Nemo sends him on a fact finding mission to learn who M is? And he instantly forgets everything he heard? Or the time he kills a policeman solely for his outfit, wafting along dressed like that where anyone can see him? Don't forget he views himself as an entirely different life form; it might not have occurred to him that the Martians would put him in the same camp.
    • Griffin switching to what he thought was the stronger side makes sense, but what really bugged me was how he thought was ever get his point across to the aliens, let alone before they just simply killed him before he could. I mean, they obviously don't speak our language, and he attempted to illustrate a complex double cross in exchange for his life through pictures in the sand that would only really make sense to us.
      • His sketches presumably wouldn't really be that difficult to pick up on, not least for a species that had developed interplanetary travel, since he's pretty much just drawing the solar system, not something you really need the Rosetta Stone for; big round thing is the sun, smaller round things are planets, they're currently on the third smaller round thing from the big round thing, and the stick figures are those two legged things they're currently massacring a lot of. As for his double cross plan, it's hardly that complex; you let me live, I'll give you what you need. The Martians are intellects far vaster than any human's, and he's not exactly summarising À la recherche du temps perdu there; they can no doubt pick it up. As for why they didn't just kill him, they were probably startled by the fact that an invisible man had just walked into their base and started chatting with them.
  • The Black Nautilus in Century 1910: Look at the panel in which it appears and then compare it to the "classic" Nautilus Mk II from the original stories, and the cutaway in the Black Dossier. Is this a newer Nautilus or a rebuild of Nautilus Mk II, or did Nemo simply upgrade the one we see? With lots and lots of guns?

I can understand the changing of the hull section between the eyes and the Rule of Cool spikey bits across the back (But the smokestacks, on a submarine? Funny Aneurysm Moment!) but the forward hull and the tentacles are confusing me; At first, I was happy that we finally found out the main use of the two that are stowed in the Hull, but the place where they are stowed has vanished, as well as the various docking apparatus and the Rule of Cool blowhole. The number of tentacles has changed (seriously, count them) and the configuration also - they used to roll up at the end and now they roll down! Soyeah. I feel robbed - I wanted * The Nautilus* to show up, but the more I look at it, the more it is apparent that something has changed. Is this an oversight on O'Neil's part, or the first stage in the "Ship of Theseus" that the Nautilus must surely undergo before the final chapter?

    • The smokestacks, at least, are explicable. In real life, early submarines often ran on the surface and dived only to sneak up on a target or escape pursuit. That was partly because of their limited air and power supply for underwater movement, and partly because running on the surface is faster and puts less strain on the hull than running underwater. In any case, these submarines used normal fossil-fuel engines when on the surface, relying on batteries and electric motors underwater. Build a Victorian submarine with steam engines and you're going to need some kind of smokestack.
  • Why does the color of Mina's eyes and hair change in every book?
    • Her eyes have always been green and her hair was brown in the first two books, and dyed blonde in the Black Dossier. They looked the same in Century, as well.
  • Moore didn't put Dracula or Sherlock Holmes in the original books because he feared they'd "over shadow" the rest of the team, yet he had no problem with James Bond and Big Brother overshadowing the Black Dossier's storyline in the slightest!
    • And they didn't. But Dracula and Sherlock Holmes have been done to death in this sort of Victorian patische style. And they technically did have an effect through Moriarty's 'death' and Mina's backstory, so does it even matter? Also, Big Brother was only in the background of The Black Dossier.
    • But the War of the Worlds makes up the entirety of the second volume.
    • And a general Victorian fictional clusterfuck crossover with Dracula as a major player would basically be, er, Anno Dracula.
      • I think the point was that they'd overshadow the main characters even as side characters. James Bond, Big Brother and the Martians were supposed to be big parts of the story.
  • If this series is supposed to be a hodgepodge of western European fiction, why have I not seen a single 1950s British blue police box in an unusual place?
    • You didn't look close enough.
      • Look closely at all of the little details on the map of the Blazing World in Black Dossier. It's in the upper-right corner.
      • Cite example or it didn't happen.
        • I believe the Almanac in vol. 2 also mentions the Silurians.
    • The 1960s haven't happened yet, and Dr. Who started in the '60s. If Moore writes a sequel to the Black Dossier, maybe the Doctor will make an appearance.
      • The Sixties chapter of Century. Expect it.
      • And true to form, while a police box doesn't appear those of us with familiarity to the classic series may recognize a certain gentleman in a black coat and bow-tie who shows up in one panel of "Century: 1969"...
      • as well as a Dalek duringMina's Acid trip in Hyde Park.
  • It bugs me that Mr. Hyde is illustrated as a big, brutish man. In the original material, when Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, he actually shrank, so it would follow that Mr. Hyde's transformation would still follow that. It's just weird that Alan Moore would ignore this bit, but pay close attention to everyone else in terms of their original characterization.
    • Well, it shall bug you no longer- Hyde, I believe during his speech after raping Griffin to death, expands upon his origins. He indeed mentions that, at first, Jekyll was actually quite fit, and he was pratically a "dwarf"... But, as he was all jekyll's excesses, powered by all his emotional and biological drives, he quickly grew bigger and stronger as moral old Jekyll, deprived of these same motivations, withered away. Over time, he simply grew more powerful, more deviant, and generally larger.
      • Jekyll also mentions in Volume 1 that Hyde was originally smaller than Jekyll, in a "can you imagine?" sense.
  • Why is Campion Bond still around in Volume 2 and not in some jail cell or executed? He worked for Moriarty and betrayed Britain, and if Griffin hadn't followed and spied on him, he and Moriarty would have succeeded.
    • Lampshaded by the new M on the penultimate page of Volume 1: "It is often useful to have employees one knows to be treacherous" (probably not the real reason, though, it does seem likely that Mycroft was somehow involved in Moriarty's schemes).
    • In addition to the above, Bond was working for Moriarty in his official capacity as Moriarty's aide in British Intelligence; he no doubt managed to weasel out of punishment by following the "I was just obeying orders!" defence. By 1910, however, it's made very clear that he's been reduced to little more than a dogsbody who gets the tea, so presumably they decided that punishment via humiliating him and completely stymying any possible chances for career advancement was satisfactory for whatever part he played.
  • In the first volume of Century, The 14th Earl of Gurney is named as a possible Jack the Ripper suspect. Century takes place in 1910. But The Ruling Class, from which the Earl of Gurney is taken, is set in the 1960s.
    • I haven't read / seen the original work, but the 'Earl of Gurney' is presumably a hereditary title, so the one who appears in the 1960s is probably a later descendant (unless the later one is specifically identified as the 14th Earl, in which case we can probably chalk this one up to a continuity error).
      • He is indeed specifically referred to as the 14th Earl of Gurney.
        • Explained by Alan Moore thinking the movie took place in around 1910.
  • So.... Didn't bother anyone else that Mina Harker, the vampiress, WATCHED A FRIGGIN SUNSET?
    • So... you're unaware, then, that in the original Dracula, sunlight did not kill him?
    • Sunlight killing vampires is a relatively recent take on the myth -- in most pre-twentieth century variations, it just weakens them to a degree that they can't use many / any of their powers.
    • Who said she's a vampire?
    • The movie is very explicit about it.
    • The movie is an In Name Only adaptation. In the book, being bitten doesn't immediately make somebody a vampire. Think about it: it might be a little inconvenient if you couldn't feast on somebody's blood without turning them into an undead creature that's powerful enough to fight you on your own terms. It would be like not being able to eat a hamburger without it turning into some amorphous, blobby beef-monster that could hunt you down and murder you with a chainsaw.
      • All of which is beside the point: In the movie, which this Headscratcher is about, she's definitely and explicitly a vampire, and we don't know the exact circumstances of her turning anyway.
      • Whether or not she's explicitly a vampire, the fact remains: the portrayal of vampires in the book and the movie is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, where the character Mina Harker first appeared. In Stoker's version, sunlight doesn't immediately kill vampires. Because of the nature of the League 'verse, there are probably numerous breeds of vampires, all hailing from different works of fiction. In all likelihood, many of them probably are killed by sunlight--but the one that bit Mina wasn't.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen/Headscratchers?oldid=1844065"