Call of Duty is one of the highest grossing video game franchises of all time, and Black Ops was one of the releases that solidified its place as a pop culture phenomenon when the series was fresh off the success of Treyarch’s World at War and Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2. Introducing a revamped multiplayer that debuted a now-standard currency system, a star studded voice cast, and new Zombies maps, Black Ops is a fan favorite among Call of Duty fans for good reason.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is its exhilarating campaign that saw the story of Alex Mason searching for redemption and revenge alongside Viktor Resnov towards a biochemical terrorist group led by Dragonovich, Steiner, and Kravchenko. However, (Spoiler Alert) as players got to the end of the game, it turns out that Mason had been brainwashed to assassinate then-president John F. Kennedy and serve as a sleeper agent for the Russians at the peak of the Cold War after being captured during a failed assassination attempt on Fidel Castro.

While the story is engaging and perfectly suitable in the realm of the Call of Duty lore, there are a still number of gaping holes that tear away the believability of the narrative, which is as entertaining as it is impractical. These are major plot holes that deserve some attention, and this list will expose the many glaring flaws in the script that needs some serious explaining on the part of the writers at Treyarch.

15 Convenient Memory Loss

Mythoszephonlog.Wordpress.com

Throughout the exciting story mode of Black Ops, you control characters in missions that Mason is reliving through his distinct memory to the minutest detail. Mason perfectly recalls entire wars, battles, and operations under the interrogation of the C.I.A. as they attempt to get Russian secrets from his memory. However, one of the most traumatic experiences must have been the days of torture he endured while being held captive at Vorkuta, where antagonist Dragonovich and his crew of nasty doctors tried brainwashing Mason. It makes no sense, especially when the tool they are using to refresh his memory is the same one that made him brainwashed in the first place. There is no excuse why it does not work on him when it clearly succeeds on every other memory he has (including some of Viktor Resnov).

14 Fidel Castro… Gracious Dictator?

Call of duty.Wiki.com

Early on in the game, Alex Mason and his war buddy Frank Woods are tasked with leading the attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where he assassinates a body-double for Fidel Castro and gets captured. This was a valiant effort on the part of Mason, but he gets himself handed over to the Russian empire by Castro as a supposed “gift” for their new found alliance. However, anyone who knows of Castro’s work as a dictator knows that he rose to prominence because of his dog-eat-dog style of politics and looking out for his own worth before anyone else’s. As covered before, this goes well beyond and against his character to give up a masterfully trained soldier of war to one of his allies as a gesture, especially when he could have used it as leverage against the United States.

13 Prison Guards Who Can’t Guard Prisons?

3djuegos.com

One of the best moments of Black Ops is when Mason makes his daring escape with Resnov from Vorkuta, and while it is one of the most action-packed moments in franchise history, but looking at the facts, it does not seem possible. First, we see Mason and Resnov in a fist fight to attract the attention of a guard, who is alone for some reason despite watching over dozens of wild prisoners (already hard to believe). Then, with the power of one gun and a few passionate prisoners that valiantly fight to escape, Mason and a fleet of escapees somehow avoid the firepower of an entire army and even have the time to set up a slingshot cannon at the top of the building. This is way too convenient for Mason.

12 Mason Finds Steiner As Reznov When He’s Not Reznov Yet

TheGamesCabin.com

Towards the middle of the game, the player takes the reigns of Mason’s C.I.A. handler Jason Hudson, who interrogates the Nazi doctor Steiner with the help of his fellow U.S. Agent Weaver. As the two get information out of him, it is revealed that Reznov was the one who revealed his position. Unfortunately, this causes a paradox as Mason had just escaped. The only way for information to have been passed along was through Mason, but he still had not resurfaced yet so the fact that no one questioned it still does not make sense. Even finding an anonymous way to give such a precious piece of information would garner massive attention from just about any U.S. force to immediately seek the holder of this information, let alone a Russian defector.

11 Russians Either Bluffing Or Have No Strategy

CallofDuty.Wikia.com

In the midst of finding out about the sleeper agent program, it is revealed that there are apparently hundreds of sleeper cells under other brainwashing programs. However, not a single trace of these supposed other agents are shown in the slightest. So the Russians have corroborated a story with Cuba to cover up a sinister plan to secretly brainwash highly-trained American agents and distribute them in strategic locations, but their most strategically important and top-secret location is only guarded by a handful of standard foot soldiers? If the plot was really crucial to the victory over the Americans in the Cold War, why would they not try using some of these agents to protect their base that basically controlled the success or failure of the operation? Either they made a grave mistake on their strategic end, or just attracted attention to themselves by bluffing their way to being defeated.

10 Bombing Themselves?

CallofDuty.Wikia.Com

In the final mission of the game, Mason and Hudson lead a charge against an underwater facility that supposedly has the Nova Six missiles that the game revolves around, as it is part of the plan of Dragonovich to bomb the States with the deadly nerve gas while letting his sleeper agents loose. But what is the point of having a few hundred agents on a field that is going to be blown to smithereens and coated with an inescapable toxic? This ties in with how they either bluffed or just made a mistake in not utilizing their agents correctly as they never truly come to fruition. This plot hole puts a massive gap in their logic that begs to be answered.

9 The Impossible Survival Of Frank Woods

GameFAQs.com

The story in Black Ops makes it clear that Woods had died during an escape from a POW camp where he kills Kravchenko by stabbing him, only for Kravchenko to pull the pins on Wood’s Grenadier belt causing them both to blow up. This death was actually retconned when Woods was revealed to have survived the ordeal, and even did more missions for the C.I.A, but if you watch the footage where he blows it up, it makes no sense. The odds are just too tough as a human body would not properly shield another human being from six or seven grenade explosions at point-blank range. Sure it made his character look tough, but this bit of information makes it difficult to believe his survival, let alone with no serious loss of limb or irreversible damage.

8 Is C.I.A. Helping The Person Who Killed J.F.K?

CallofDuty.Wikia.Com

As Mason hunts down Dragonovich during the last mission, Dragonovich hints that Mason was responsible for the assassination of John Kennedy, and the ending credits give more evidence to this by showing a picture of Mason in a crowd in November 22nd, 1963 surrounding Kennedy. At the same time, a voice over from Mason describing the manner of which he was killed is played. We as players are led to believe that Oswald was some sort of scapegoat or was framed for the murder of the charismatic president, however, if such a thing was true, why would the C.I.A. have no knowledge to this? Furthermore, if they did know about it somehow, why did Hudson not mention it to Mason as part of the interrogation? Wouldn’t that jog his memory a little better than some shock therapy? Then it would either be a clear case of treason by the C.I.A. or an embarrassing lack of knowledge.

7 Failed Assassination Attempts

CallofDuty.Wikia.com

Once Mason is recovered from captivity in Vorkuta he is brought to the White House by Jason Hudson to discuss a plan to assassinate Dragonovich with none other than the commander-in-chief himself, John F. Kennedy. Throughout the meeting, however, Mason keeps fighting an urge to blast JFK in the face with an M1911 pistol because he keeps envisioning it, but manages to stay calm and collective. Now, this in itself can be explained by Mason’s own will to stay loyal, but if he ends up killing Kennedy with a much more sinister plot (as revealed later) why does he have the urge to do something so rash? It is not like the Russians implemented a communist agenda, as he is essentially a hired gun with no feelings after the brainwashing process so he should follow a clean method of killing.

6 Strange Brainwashing Methods

CallofDuty.Wikia.Com

One of the biggest plot devices used throughout the story is that the C.I.A. is aware of the brainwashing that Mason has endured, and they are trying to extract all the information about the process they can from him. However, no one at the Central Intelligence Agency is apparently intelligent enough to realize he is under the control of a person, as he does not seem to be under a set of ideals but rather a completely alternative perspective. This is where Reznov’s presence as an alter-ego poses an obvious issue where the C.I.A. should avoid trying to convince a defector to be on their side, especially when it is clear that the defector did it for his own redemption and a shot at saving the world instead of trying to keep powers aligned.

5 Highly Trained Operatives Couldn’t Distinguish Bipolarity

Whitehawkup2 – YouTube.com

After Mason escapes Vorkuta and is already brainwashed, he promptly rejoins his brigade and goes into Vietnam to carry out missions in an attempt to win the war against the communist country. Throughout these missions, Mason constantly talks to “Resnov,” despite him being a pure figment of his imagination, and even characters like Bowman openly question the behavior of Mason, but no one reports on it. Obviously something as serious as war requires all the intel that they could get, and the notion that no one questioned the erratic behavior of Mason to their superiors is just flat-out unbelievable, and is even further impractical when it is shown that he even referred to himself as “Resnov” throughout the story.

4 Reznov Trained To Brainwash?

CallofDuty.Wikia.Com

At the climax of the story is the infamous reveal where Mason learns he has been imagining his supposed friend Reznov, who somehow hijacked the process to install his own personality into the mind of Mason before their escape from Vorkuta. This is just strange, because if Reznov had such a distinct angst against the doctors for using humans as a test subject, why did he dictate his revenge plot by using another human being (that is also a friend) as a test subject? Furthermore, how did he get control of the process to the point where he was almost one hundred percent successful despite having no medical background? This is where we start going down the rabbit hole of gaps in the plot of Black Ops.

3 Reznov Can Start His Own Army But Settles With One Guy Instead

CallofDuty.Wikia.Com

So it is clear that Reznov’s hijacking of the brainwashing program was a ploy to get the upper hand on the people that put him in jail and killed his friends, and seeing as his expertise as a soldier was shown in World at War, we know that he has a good mind for military strategy. However as someone smart enough to realize how to win an entire war, how is it that he settles on only using just one of the sleeper cell agents as opposed to just using all of them? Clearly, he had the time to carefully plan this, so there is no reason as to why he would not just enlist the help of the other hundred highly trained soldiers that would have no problem fighting against their captors.

2 How Did A Prisoner Get Access To A Top-Secret Program?

Areajugones.sport.es

Seriously, how did Reznov carefully sneak in and out of the brainwashing program without being caught or at least having someone one else assist him? He apparently had enough time to commandeer the operation and instill his personality into Mason and go back to his cell and play prisoner until the supposedly better escape plan came to fruition. If he had access to escape before, why did he not supply weapons to the prisoners for the grand escape or slowly take out the prison guards while they slept? It is shown he has the ability to take down armies of men with nothing more than a hatchet, so it would be a stretch to say he did not have better opportunities than charging blindly into gunfire and unnecessarily sacrificing himself to save Mason.

1 Reznov Caused 6 Years Of War

http://cdn.wccftech.com

Apparently, while being held captive at the maximum security prison, Reznov is somehow able to get out, infiltrate the top secret brainwashing room, brainwash his friend, go back to his cell, and plot a more dangerous method of escape despite somehow getting access to the room in the first place. This is ridiculous, and the biggest plot hole in the entire game stems from the stupidity that Reznov uncharacteristically displays by not simply killing the doctors. It would be so easy considering there is no security due to the secrecy of the project. This means if Reznov had access to the room, he could have freed Mason and the rest of the sleeper cell agents thus thwarting one of the most sinister conspiracies of all-time and saving thousands of lives in the process.