The Shawshank Redemption The Rewatchables
The Shawshank Redemption poster
The Shawshank Redemption

Picking Nits

The panel questions nearly every logistical step in Andy's escape, Red's search, prison life, the opera system, public funding, and the preserved Brooks carving.

In the discussion (22)
Approx. transcript time · 01:26:12Read transcript
  • Andy's escape depends on a precisely timed thunderstorm after he has already committed to the suit and book switch.
  • The panel questions how Andy knew the pipe would break with only a few strikes.
  • The panel asks why Andy did not enter the pipe closer to its outlet and how he knew which direction to crawl.
  • The poster's ability to remain attached over the tunnel and to be replaced after each visit is difficult to explain.
  • Crawling five hundred yards through hot sewage seems likely to cause vomiting, unconsciousness, or death.
  • The panel doubts one bar of soap and rain could remove the sewage smell before Andy entered banks the next morning.
  • Andy’s suit looks implausibly clean and pressed the next morning.
  • The supposedly durable plastic bag carrying Andy's papers and chess pieces is treated as impossibly effective.
  • The poster never loses a corner, and Andy appears unable to reattach it once inside his body-sized hole.
  • The panel asks what substitutes for Andy during bed checks while he is inside the tunnel.
  • The late-1940s prison sound system seems incapable of reproducing the opera beautifully, though deprived listeners might hear it subjectively.
  • The state responding to Andy's repeated letters with library money seems less likely than officials discarding them.
  • A six-foot-five man fitting through the pipe makes Tom Cruise's hypothetical casting seem logistically easier.
  • Red's ability to locate the correct Buxton cornfield and volcanic rock from one old conversation is debated.
  • The prison appears to contain no serious threats beyond the Sisters despite the story spanning nineteen years.
  • Red's connections do not produce protection for Andy during the two years before Hadley intervenes.
  • One participant says the Alan Green shoutout comes two seconds too early.
  • The rooming house leaves Brooks's suicide carving untouched and assigns Red the same room.
  • The warden allows an unusually large, lightly supervised prison library operation while profiting from Andy's laundering.
  • The suit should seem tighter because Andy is taller than the warden.
  • The library funding is defended as only five hundred dollars a year toward rehabilitation and GEDs.
  • The warden allowing the library to be named after Brooks is questioned.