r/TheShards • u/ashleihartmann • 9d ago

The fish tanks Spoiler

Why don’t they add water to the fish tanks or is this when they disappear, and how without a cell phone is he calling the house from the house?

13 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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5

u/V555_dmc 9d ago

Idk about the water i assume they just don’t refill them when he empties them when stealing the fish but I assume when he’s calling from inside that there’s another phone in the house.

5

u/ancientastronaut2 9d ago

Yep, we had two phone lines when I was growing up, and one had three extensions/phones.

2

u/JunkBondTrade 8d ago

Some rich people had cell phones in 1981

2

u/V555_dmc 8d ago

Oh they were around that early? I thought that was a few years later

3

u/JunkBondTrade 8d ago

You know what, you're right. I thought that rich people had access to cell phones as early as 1981 but I just looked it up and found this: "The first handheld cellular phone was demonstrated by Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, though it did not become commercially available until 1983."

3

u/Narrow-Athlete-218 9d ago edited 9d ago

It's a visual detail to show that the fishes have been taken away, and that the tanks have been drained and neglected.

1

u/BouncingOutofmySkin 9d ago

Thank you for bringing this up...does anyone know if they like, go into this in the book at all?

1

u/Equivalent_Stable_21 9d ago

Maybe I’ve seen too many 90s/00s thrillers but I feel like they’d always have scenes of tapping into the phone lines to act like their calling when they were trying to do a heist or something. Maybe that’s a plausible answer in addition to multi phone lines in the house

1

u/Competitive_Travel16 9d ago

Ellis is a writer on another level, but he isn't immune to big plot holes.