Titanic/Fridge

• Fridge Logic: Couldn't Jack have just pushed one of the already dead people off a piece of debris to save himself?
  • He's keeping Rose's debris balanced and a deleted scene shows him guarding that float from other survivors.
  • If Rose had just stayed on the lifeboat she actually boarded, it seems like Jack would have had a much better chance of survival, for one, he wouldn't have been chased back below deck by Cal and submerged in the freezing waters again (something that in real life would have only exacerbated his hypothermia even if he got back out) but presumably he would have done the same thing he did with Rose, that is, ride the ship down then find the floating door. Then they both could have survived.
    • If Rose didn't stay with Jack, he would have been sucked down by the ship since he's not wearing any life vest. Also, if Rose remained with her mother, she wouldn't have escaped her miserable life and promise Jack to "hold on."
    • The above is talking about the second lifeboat, the one Rose actually boards. Her mother's in an earlier one, launched from the same side-they're both put in by Lightoller-but well away. If she'd stayed on that boat, whether she hides from her mother or not depends on whether or not Cal makes it and can tell her mother Rose is still alive.
• Fridge Horror: An in-universe example with Rose when she remembers what Andrews told her earlier about the number of lifeboats while he is telling her that the ship is, in fact, sinking.
  • Rose alerts the lifeboat by prying an officer's whistle out of Chief Officer Wilde's dead hands. When Lowe's boat takes her aboard, he can't have not noticed the blue frozen corpse of his immediate superior staring him in the face and realized where she got the whistle. Bad enough to see all the relatively-anonymous corpses, looking straight at someone who until about twenty minutes ago was your coworker, boss, and if not for an order from another superior, that might have been you in the water....
    • It can get even worse if you stop to wonder how many people weren't lucky enough to be floating next to a dead man with a whistle. Who else was out there, left to watch their only chance of rescue drift by because they couldn't make themselves be heard?
  • If we take Option A and the ending is really Rose dying and going to heaven and that's really their afterlife...well, look around. There's all the people we saw die, except Cal who's there to, what, rub salt in his wounds even beyond the grave? Including all the third-class passengers we got to meet, Rose's maid, the orchestra, the stewards manning the doors, Captain Smith, First Officer Murdoch, Thomas Andrews...so, if this is their afterlife, sucks to be them. Smith, Murdoch, Andrews, at least one of the orchestra were all married with families that weren't on the Titanic, Chief Officer Wilde (aka dead guy with the whistle) was a widower whose wife was already dead before the sinking, Astor's wife and unborn child lived long lives without him yet here he is, what about Fabrizio's beloved mother? So either this is Titanic heaven, and it's STILL all about Rose and Jack, or, given Cal's otherwise-inexplicable presence, this isn't heaven...
    • This heaven is like a dream. When you dream, the characters in your dream, despite being real friends to you in waking life, do not have consciousness of their own (Which is why things like 'Hey Matt, remember when you drove a snowplow in my dream that one time? Oh yea, I do, that was awesome' don't happen) Which I guess is kinda scary in its own that all the people she sees are empty beyond the actions towards her. Maybe at least Jack can maintain inner thought. The 'real' Mr. Andrews for example probably has a different afterlife from his perspective, with friends and family of his own, back home in his own happiest time of life.
    • Or maybe they just stopped by to welcome Rose to the afterlife, honoring her status as a fellow Titanic passenger, but can return to join their own deceased loved ones whenever they choose.
  • So, what DID happen to Rose's mother? She admits to Rose she's pressuring her to marry Cal because her deadbeat dead husband left them with nothing but the family name and a pile of debt. Rose marries rich, they can pay off the creditors, if she doesn't, all their belongings are sold off and her mother's taking in sewing. Now, she might have been exaggerating, but the fact that Rose's marriage is apparently their only trump card suggests there aren't any close relatives to take them in. Old Rose mentions that she 'heard' Cal shot himself after the Crash of '29, but doesn't say anything about her mother. (You know, the previously-unknown great-grandmother of that nice granddaughter who feeds her Pomeranian and hauls her out for helicopter rides to Russian research vessel in the middle of the North Atlantic and presumably packed all those trunks? Ie, is doing Trudy's job now?) So did Ruth have to swallow her pride, hock all her belongings, and either take up seamstressing or throw herself on the charity and pity of her society friends? Or did she take a darker option?
• For animal lovers: What happened to those dogs we saw the stewards walking earlier in the film? They're not on the lifeboats...
  • In real life, I think at least one of the dogs was taken into a lifeboat by a passenger. Most of the dogs did die, though.
  • Three very small dogs were taken on board the lifeboats by their owners. The other nine dogs that were on the Titanic didn't make it; in fact, one woman left her seat in a lifeboat to go back and try to save her Great Dane, and her body was found floating hours later, her dead dog clutched in her frozen arms.
• Fridge Brilliance: Sure, he did it for epically selfish reasons, but Cal almost certainly saved the life of that child. The girl was hiding in a corner (which small children often do because they are scared and/or because they think whatever scary thing is happening is their fault), she had obviously gotten separated from her parents/guardians and chances are no one else would have helped her even if they found her, because they were all trying to save themselves and their families. It doesn't matter that Cal only did it to save himself; the fact is that she only ended up on that lifeboat because he picked her up and carried her there. If he hadn't, she probably would have either gotten trampled to death by panicking people, or she would have died when the ship went down.
  • Something that might turn into Fridge Horror if you know your Titanic history and remember that all of the survivors from that lifeboat were adult males.
    • What? What, exactly, are you implying? I'm pretty damned sure that if she somehow ended up on a lifeboat populated only by adult males, they'd have the decency to protect her, and not do something horrible to her.
      • That's not what (s)he was getting at. If the only survivors from that lifeboat were adult males, that means the little girl wasn't a survivor from that lifeboat, and somehow did not end up making it to the Carpathia. It doesn't matter because it's the wrong boat anyway.
    • Wrong lifeboat. Collapsible B, the lifeboat that is 'launched' upside-down only had adult males. Collapsible C, the one Cal boarded, had plenty of female and child passengers for the girl to be considered among the survivors.
      • Cal was actually on Collapsable A. It was the Collapsable that was attatched to roof, managed to get right-side up but didn't manage to get its sides fully up.
        • Collapsible A actually did have one female survivor on board: Rosa Abbott, who the woman Cal gave the little girl to probably is. And since the little girl is probably entirely fictional by comparison, her being in the lifeboat isn't any more Fridge Horror than Cal's being in it.
    • Also, the Carpathia reached them in about four hours. I doubt that a few hours floating in a lifeboat after watching the unsinkable ship go down with over a thousand people still on board is going to turn a lifeboat full of men into Complete Monsters.
  • Another layer of Fridge Horror: Suppose that the girl's family didn't board a lifeboat because they were looking for her while Cal had already gotten her on a lifeboat already. There is an early scene where the girl appears with her family, and it is a really big one with lots of little children.
    • Uh, that was the last boat away (except the one that wound up upside-down.) If Cal hadn't thrown her in there, then the only difference would have been her ENTIRE family would die (assuming that the mother and other kids weren't on another boat already and her father, who was likely dead one way or another, was left looking for her.) Though the 'looking for a lost child who was actually already gone' did cause the only first-class child fatality, Lorraine Allison, who was with her parents looking for her baby brother and his nurse (who were in a lifeboat already.)
      • Sorry to bust everyone's bubble... But that girl and the woman Cal gave her to is dead. Rosa Abbott wasn't in that boat originally when it was launched: She was left on board the Titanic when she sank, and clambered into Collapsible A after the final plunge, and there were no children in that boat. Cal is probably one of the only original passengers of that boat to have not spilled out when it tipped over.
• Not sure if this is Fridge Horror or not. The idea that Jack and Fabrizio's names aren't on the lists (due to them running on board at the last minute and having tickets they hadnt purchased themselves) so Fabrizio's family will NEVER know where he is, if he is alive, or what happened to him. Him and Jack are completely lost in time!
  • Related to this, it's hard not to wonder what the Swedish guys who lost their tickets at cards will think, not only at the thought that their (presumably) friends are quite probably dead, but that for the want of a bad hand at poker it could have very easily been them...
• Fridge Horror: The electricity was powered by the boilers, which were being run by men shoveling coal into them. Remember that when you see the lights flicker as the ship sinks and how long it takes for the lights to finally go out for good.
  • There were six boiler rooms. They didn't all flood at once.