I'm pretty casual about minor details in movies & TV episodes, but now & then, I see something that I just can't get out of my head...
Last night, while watching an episode of Castle (2009) Season 3, I saw something that just screamed stupidity.
Kate Beckett enters a crime scene where a body is laying face up on the floor. The ME is standing nearby & a nickel plated 4" barrel Colt Python .357 revolver is on the floor near the corpse.
Beckett looks at the scene & says, that gun is too big for the hole in his chest & the ME smiles & says, "He was shot with a 9mm automatic." Presumably, they know this because they dug the slug out of a nearby coffee table.
Now, Beckett clearly identifies the revolver on the floor as a .357 Magnum, which is correct. Kudos to her for knowing the caliber. However, everyone in the room seems to be totally oblivious to the fact that a .357 Magnum & a 9mm automatic bullet are virtually the same size. You can reload a bullet, designed for the 9mm into a .357 Magnum case just fine. The differences in actual diameter of the two bullets are .001", at most. For all intents & purposes, they are identical, yet, a big deal is made of the fact that different guns were used & base this 'fact' on the calibers, which are not significant.
Even digging the slug out of a coffee table, having passed through the victim's chest & stopping in wood, being necessarily mangled beyond normal recognition, doesn't provide definitive evidence it came from an automatic. There was never any mention of a spent case found anywhere. If an automatic had been used, the ejected case would have been on the floor, unless the killer picked it up before departing. This aspect isn't even mentioned. Without a spent case, there's no real evidence that an automatic was used & it certainly doesn't rule out the possibility that the discovered bullet actually came from the Python on the floor.
Now, I can overlook some lapses, but this was just too egregious to ignore. I mean, really!