Richard Dysart, who played Dr. Copper in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), showed up on the Antarctic set with a nose ring in his right nostril. Carpenter let it ride, which means a 50-something military camp physician in 1982 Antarctica has a visible nose piercing throughout the film. Fans have been arguing about it for decades. The Outpost #31 fan forum has multiple threads: one camp says it was deliberate character backstory (Dysart reportedly told people he'd conceived Copper as a former Russian spy, and the ring fit the freewheeling identity), another says Dysart just liked the ring, and Carpenter didn't think it mattered. A third camp — probably the most grounded — points out that it appears inconsistently across shots, a continuity slip that Carpenter never bothered to fix. The Reddit r/horror thread on the subject is full of people who've watched the movie dozens of times and never noticed it until someone pointed it out, then immediately rewatched.…