Red One’s Gryla Plan Left 1 Plot Hole Everyone Forgot About
2024’s Red One introduces the winter witch Gryla (Kiernan Shipka) and her plan to end Christmas, but the movie leaves one plot hole in her plan that everyone forgot about amid all the action. Red One arrived with a mix of action, comedy, fantasy, and bits of drama along with the Christmas spirit, led by Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. Directed by Jake Kasdan, Red One takes the audience to the North Pole as Callum Drift (Johnson), commander of Santa Claus’ Enforcement Logistics and Fortification (ELF, for short) faces a major emergency: Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) being kidnapped.
The investigation of Santa Claus’ kidnapping leads MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority) to hacker Jack O’Malley (Evans), with whom Callum is forced to team up. Together they find out that the one behind Santa Claus’ kidnapping is Gryla, the winter witch and powerful troll who can take the form of any person as she’s also a shapeshifter. Gryla’s plan includes the creation of many, many snow globes to trap people in them, but this leaves one plot hole that everyone forgot about in the rest of Red One.
Red One Forgets About Gryla’s First Snow Globe Target
Gryla Tested Her Snow Globes On The First Name On The Naughty List
What Gryla wants is to end Christmas by getting rid of everyone on the Naughty List. For this, Gryla gets her hands on the “glaskafig”, a magical snow globe that imprisons whoever touches it. As there are a lot of names on the Naughty List, Gryla uses a toy-duplicating machine in Santa Claus’ old workshop – and it’s revealed that Santa never left the North Pole, as Gryla’s lair is underneath the North Pole, in Santa’s now-unused old workshop. Gryla successfully duplicates the snow globes and sets her plan into motion, sending one to the first name on the list.
With the help of her shapeshifting sons, Gryla sends a snow globe to the man at the top of the Naughty List, leaving it as a present inside his car. The man is imprisoned in the snow globe as soon as he touches it, and one of Gryla’s sons takes the snow globe with him. Later on in Red One, Jack and his son, Dylan, are also trapped in snow globes and taken to Gryla’s lair – however, the snow globe with the first target is nowhere to be seen.
Gryla’s defeat doesn’t mean the automatic freedom of her prisoners.
Dylan and Jack have a heart-to-heart conversation while in their respective snow globes, which magically makes them “nicer” in the world of Red One and so their snow globes break, freeing them. After Gryla’s defeat at the end of Red One, which includes her own imprisonment in a snow globe, it’s unknown what happened to the first target in a snow globe, as Gryla’s defeat doesn’t mean the automatic freedom of her prisoners.
Gryla’s Plan In Red One Doesn’t Make Much Sense
Gryla’s Plan Left Many Questions
The fate of Gryla’s first victim in Red One is just one of many questions left about her overall plan. It’s unknown what Gryla’s actual motivation is to want to get rid of everyone on the Naughty List, and even if it’s just assumed that she’s evil, it’s not that good of a plan for a villain. If Gryla wanted to end Christmas and truly get rid of Santa Claus and the North Pole, she would have imprisoned those on the Nice List rather than the “naughty” ones.
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It’s also unclear what she planned to do once Christmas was over and what she would have turned the North Pole into, as even if she managed to imprison everyone on the Naughty List, the list would have had new names the following year. Gryla’s plan is nothing more than a plot device for Santa Claus’ kidnapping and rescue in Red One, and as such, it leaves one too many questions and at least one plot hole.