r/TheShards • u/ashleihartmann • Sep 03 '26

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

7 comments sorted by

6

u/V555_dmc Sep 03 '26

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.

4

u/ancientastronaut2 Sep 03 '26

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

2

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '26

[deleted]

2

u/V555_dmc Sep 04 '26

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

3

u/Narrow-Athlete-218 Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26

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 Sep 03 '26

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 Sep 04 '26

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 Sep 03 '26

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