The first season of “Wednesday” starring Jenna Ortega has turned out to be an absolute mega hit for Netflix. However, the makers also made a faux pas, which you can see immediately if you pay attention to it at the right time…
With more than 1.2 billion (!) hours of viewing in the first 30 days after its release in November 2022 alone, Wednesday is the second most successful English-language series in Netflix history – only just surpassed by the fourth season ” Stranger”. Things”, which also had an unfair advantage, however, because the season was released in two blocks and thus a much longer period than “Wednesday” was included in the calculation.
With such a huge success behind them, the creators of the series, with all the annoyance you somehow feel at every mistake made, can probably ultimately be very relaxed about the fact that not everything in all eight episodes of the first season went 100 percent perfectly. For example, a particularly striking faux pas was made by those responsible in episode 5. The error may not be immediately obvious when you look through it normally – but if you hit pause at two very specific points, it can hardly be overlooked…
A moving corpse
The fifth season is about a moment from when Wednesday’s parents Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) started attending Nevermore Academy. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) comes across an old police file that says her father was charged with the murder of Normie Garret Gates (Lewis Hayes). iTwice as the episode progresses, we see Garret fall off some scaffolding after being pierced with a sword.
Bee Minute 29 and 19 seconds it looks like this:
Just four minutes later (at 33.16) it suddenly looks like this:
So the fallen man’s body suddenly moved as if by magic… (both scenes show the dead man right after the fall, so it can’t be that he crawled there long ago badly injured)
Maybe not a mistake?
However, there is a – actually – quite ingenious explanation for the different positions: Both scenes are flashbacks – once from Gomez’s perspective and once from Morticia’s perspective, with the couple blatantly contradicting each other in their statements about the course of the crime. Just like in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece “Rashomon – Das Lustwaldchen”, in which different witnesses recapitulate the same crime from different perspectives with (slightly) shifted details, episode 5 of “Wednesday” could also be about the subjectivity of memories.
So it would fit the concept perfectly if the corpse fell to the floor of the schoolyard at a slightly offset angle in Gomez and Morticia’s memories!
But there is still a problem with this exculpatory theory: In the second flashback, you see Garret falling – exactly as he should be after the serve in the same way as in the first. Again, the fall simply doesn’t match the positioning of the corpse seconds later, clearly indicating that the makers themselves almost certainly didn’t have this ingenious reading of the film error on their screens at all…