Midway through S3E3 and I’m really not caring for the split timeline (to date, for the entire season so far), particularly as the “past” events (seemingly five minutes in our future) are not particularly interesting and the characters kind of suck, too. Also, so much of the depiction of the military stuff is nonsensical, possibly starting with the time/distance calculations for when Congress Guy’s sister sees him to when she carries out the mission supposedly from an aircraft carrier. Maybe I am just inferring a shorter timeline than I should be, but it really seems like the Iran mission is imminent—as in within a matter of days or even just a couple—when they meet, but then it is explicitly launched thousands of miles away (by itself not a problem) from the deck of an aircraft carrier (in which case, how the hell is she back in the US on the eve of such an important mission? Yes, in theory, she could be on leave, but… she wouldn’t be. She just wouldn’t. Not just a couple days before such an important mission, or even realistically while her squadron is deployed at all, outside something like attending a funeral for an immediate relative).
And then on the more tactical side… no. Just no. You do not fly aircraft, let alone for a combat sortie as part of a planned operation, to pass that close to a ship launching cruise missiles right as it is launching. Not only is that not a thing, that is a thing that planners and even individual operators actively avoid.
And the stupidity continues even into the finer details (to the point I might just let it go as mere nitpicks, if it weren’t part of such an immersion-shattering series of unforced errors). From the utterly boneheaded use of unencrypted analog communications (not only can they be intercepted and listened in on as shown in the series itself: they can also be tracked from hundreds of miles away at least through radio direction finding, literally a WWII-era technology) to the Commanding Officer of USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, being a Surface Warfare Officer (by law, they have to be a flight officer or an aviator). Unfortunately I did not catch how many stripes he had on his sleeve (couldn’t tell if it was 3 or 4), but if it was only 3, that’s another obvious blunder (he also did not have anywhere close to the number of ribbons one would expect for the CO of a CVN these days).
Ugh. I just really hope they will have the good sense to wrap up the past (5 minutes into our future) timeline midway through the season so we can get back to focusing on the one timeline where I at least care a little about the characters.
That said, don’t for a minute think I don’t have some concerns with the Juliette Nichols timeline (for starters, there’s the “idiot plot” to unnecessarily introduce tension as all her friends know her memory is gone, at least for now, but being so easily offended by her… not remembering them).
