Open questions and a content note
Contradictions, unexplained terms and unwritten pieces found while reading the screenplay, with links to the places in the text. None of the source text was changed to resolve them.
Content note: Steinberg and the “reptilian” treaty plot
For the designer to reconsider
This is a flag, not an edit. Every line quoted here is still in the full text of Gear 3, unchanged and marked with an amber bar.
What the text does
The Gear 3 villain, Mr. George K. Steinberg, is introduced as the person who signed a 1945 treaty that let aliens take Earth’s resources (scene). Stacy then explains that he was not native to Earth but belonged, “along with other notable figures in Earth history”, to a reptilian race, the Nagharsz, who “hid their presence from humans two thousand years ago”, and that he is now the leader of the pirates (scene). Ralph answers: “when Charlie said reptilians ran the government, he wasn’t kidding”. Later Lin calls him “you lizard bastard” (scene) and calls Quartz “lizard” and “reptilian” (G4, G5), Giselle says “lizard people” (G4), and Ralph says volcanoes cannot be “a psyop made by the lizards” (G5). The Arizona “Home” text blames “those lizards” for “the bullshit fed to young men” (Places).
The words
In the arena, Steinberg calls Ralph “you white monkey” (scene), and addresses him as “goy” three times (once in this scene, twice in this one). Ralph answers the first insult with “Woah there, that’s racism!”.
Why it is flagged
A secret reptilian race that has hidden among world leaders for millennia, signed a pact with them and runs a global deception is the shape of a well-known conspiracy theory, and that theory has long been used as a coded way of talking about Jews. The villain’s lines add “goy”, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew, and he contemptuously calls humans “obsessed with your so-called justice and morals”; his surname is Steinberg. Together these read like an antisemitic trope even if none was intended.
Options the designer could weigh
Not applied: rename or re-theme the villain and his people; drop “goy” and “white monkey”; keep the treaty plot but make the signer a mundane or invented alien; or keep the lines but make clear within the story that the villain is wrong. This site changes nothing in the source text.
Related flags in the text
Lower weight: Lin keeps a mech she took from the arrester ship and plans to say she got it from the pirates (scene); Bailey’s drug use is a running joke (scene, scene); and Dani is fifteen and lives in a household with an adult man who often pats her head while she blushes (scene, scene). These are listed so the designer can decide whether each is intended.
Names that disagree
- The car and the robot Stacy first calls the unit “HP500GTFM, model 302”, Bailey says Ralph’s car is named “Stallion or something like that” (there is a horse logo on the grill), and Ralph renames the unit Horse Power (scene). The court still charges Ralph with stealing “model 302, ID HP500GTFM” (scene). The renaming presumably does not reach the Federation’s records. Only the first scene explains “HP500”: “That’s about how much HP my car has”.
- Horsepower figures The name suggests 500 hp (Gear 1), while Ralph says “it has 600 horsepower” in Gear 5 (scene). The car was also “powered by gasoline” and is now “powered by cosmic energy” (scene); the tone suggests the 600 figure could be an upgrade, but nothing says so.
- The dragon Ralph asks “where is Quelm hiding” (scene), says “guess we gotta ask Quazar” (scene), and then names her Quartz (scene). She replies “It’s Quetzalcoatl”; Giselle says “Miss Quetzalcoatl”. When Giselle first says the name Ralph answers “Que… What?” (scene), so Quelm and Quazar may be deliberate slips, but the text never says so.
- Lin “Lin” is the nickname Ralph gives for a name nobody can pronounce, Æ'kςhδmειγη (scene); in Gear 4 he says “you’re gonna bug her systems with your real name” (scene). The stage directions call her “the alien woman” until Gear 3. Her species has no name. Quartz asks if she is unwelcome “in Egypt nor England anymore”, an unexplained hint at a past on Earth (scene).
- Giselle Stacy says “model GX8008135L” (scene), Steinberg shouts “RISE, MY BATTLE ANGEL” (scene), the unlock line says “battle angel”, and Ralph names her Giselle (scene). Stacy first calls her “completely autonomous” and a “war machine” (scene), then says she was “made from gathered data from one specific citizen” (scene).
- “Spekkle” The opposing lawyer says Earth’s leaders agreed to “allow the Spekkle in and collect resources” (scene). The word appears once and is not explained. It is probably the aliens’ name for themselves, or for the species Lin belongs to, but the text does not say; nobody else uses it, and the Nagharsz are also on the other side of the treaty.
Lore that does not add up yet
- Who knew about aliens Stacy says “no civilian on Earth knows about life outside of it”, “the governments of a few nations… never managed to reach contact with any of them” (scene). In Gear 2 she says the US and the Soviet Union have had mechs since 1960 and repelled alien invaders without telling the public (scene), and Area 51 holds alien-looking spaceships (scene). Contact and repelling invaders are not the same as “never reached contact”, but the two statements sit uneasily.
- Treaty date and the past The judge says the agreement was signed on 3 September 1945 by Steinberg (scene) and the lawyer says it was “several decades ago”; Stacy says the Nagharsz hid from humans “two thousand years ago” and that “those who knew died thousands of years ago”. A treaty in 1945 and a 2,000-year secret can coexist, but the text does not say how.
- Which treaty Steinberg signed for “Earth”, but Stacy says Earth never had a single world leader and the relevant leader would have been Truman (scene). The judge accepts this at once, and the lawyer who argued the treaty is not heard from again.
- Aztec, Maya, Inca Eldorado is described in the Inca terms by Ralph (“the Incas were truly ahead of their time”, scene), the guardian is an Inca warrior, Quartz is Aztec, the Aztec empire “ended almost 500 years ago”, and the Mayan calendar is hers (scene). Quartz herself says she was worshipped by “the Mayans and the Incas” (scene).
- Dragons The Federation’s data calls the dragon a threat, Giselle says “dragons live for thousands of years” (scene); the Horse Power is “built to fight dragons” (scene), yet the dragon turned out harmless. Quartz says dragons are spat out of the planet’s core in an underworld, so “Quetzalcoatl” is one among many, though the Federation sent the unit for one.
- Eldorado’s location Stacy says it “doesn’t seem to be located on Earth” but is not a pocket dimension (scene); Giselle calls it “based on Earth” on a different plane; Quartz says the dome hides it “from this world’s plane”. Three phrasings of one idea, not contradictory but not the same.
Timeline slips
- Gear 2 opens “a few days later”. Dani says that “in the span of two days” she was beaten and learned a lot, and Ralph says he has had the mech “for two days” (scene). “A few days” and “two days” can both be read as true, but only if the trip started the day after the house scene.
- At the trial Stacy says the unit “was sent to Earth five days ago”, while Ralph says they have been away “three days at least” (scene). Between the meteor and that moment the text has Gear 2 starting “a few days later”, a six-hour drive and an eight-hour flight; five days is hard to fit.
- Dani says she has fought the aliens “for months” (scene, scene), while the Horse Power arrived only days earlier. That is consistent if the aliens were already on Earth before the unit came, which the text implies without saying.
- Dani says she is from San Francisco (scene) and later compares Europa’s quiet to “New York” (scene); nothing explains the second city.
- Gear 5 says “a few weeks” after Gear 4, and the Mayan calendar’s date (21 December 2012) was “13 years ago” (scene): the story is set in or around 2025.
- Ralph tells Dani and Bailey, “I have a house, not a very big one, but it has two bedrooms, and I live by myself” (scene); from Gear 4 five people live there plus himself, and the house is “a mobile home” (scene). The housing does not add up; it may be an upgrade the text skips.
Passengers: the seventh is missing
The designer says there are seven girls, one rides along, each is unlocked in a chapter, and Stacy does not count. The screenplay names five (Bailey, Dani, Lin, Giselle, Quartz) and shows a sixth in Gear 5 (the girl with the pet kaiju), whom no line calls a passenger. Nothing in the script identifies a seventh. The Gear 5 script stops in the village, so a seventh could still come later, but the document gives no hint.
The ults are described only for Bailey (a joint that slows time) and for the default ult (a ground-slam shockwave). Dani’s ult is mentioned as usable in the Gear 3 plaza fight and never described; Lin’s, Giselle’s and Quartz’s are not mentioned.
The non-canon branches are not written: Gear 2 has only “(IF DANI IS CHOSEN)”; Gear 3 writes only Dani staying behind; Gear 4 and Gear 5 write only the canon passenger. The three side missions (Antarctica, Chernobyl, Atlantis) have no content.
Gear 5 is unfinished
The script ends mid-scene in the village of the underworld girl, with a tribesman asking what kind of monster the car is and Quartz starting to answer (scene, end of the text). The Armageddon fight, the way to the sealed portal and any ending are not written. Open promises: Ralph says he will take all the girls to Yellowstone after this (scene). The Federation’s “global threat” turned out in Gear 4 to be a misunderstanding about Quartz, while Quartz now names a real one, Armageddon; whether the Federation’s call meant him is not said.
Slips in the source, kept as written
The full texts keep the designer’s typos and slips. Examples: a stage direction says the alien woman “thinks to himself” (scene); “Stace answers” (scene); “the club combo must me parried” (scene). Names in the speaker highlighting depend on the words “says”, “asks”, “answers” and similar and may miss some lines.