You missed that this show is based on a comic book and thus requires one suspend a lot of disbelief. Or perhaps one just needs a little imagination.
Maybe the baby was a wunderkin and graduated high school at the age of 16. Back in those days, it was fairly common for people to get a writing gig without a college degree if they were good enough. And for all we know, she had a roommate who is never shown. Or she was house-sitting for someone wealthy and important (a literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps).
I can think of some wild and crazy things in this show (like Veidt being able to fish newborn babies out of a pond and having a machine that can make them reach adulthood in a matter of seconds). The ages of Will and his wife don’t even make the top 20.
So how did they wind up with Looking Glass’ ex-wife?
Science fiction does depend on suspension of disbelief. The consumer is required to accept devices like giant psychic squids as plotlines. That’s why many people cannot “get” science fiction.
The flip side is the reward consumers receive from seeing how those crazy plotlines affect people just like them. When those people aren’t real, then the pleasure drains away.
We’ve had many threads talking about this phenomenon. The small things movies and tv get wrong bother many people far more than the big things included just for the fun of it. And there’s no need for these lapses. They’re just sloppiness.
Like the “lack” of computers. Tech is different in this world. Fine. Then why did the animal cloning center have two computer monitors on its reception desk? And just how do they think the CD players work if not with a computer chip? Sloppy.
Will Reeves left them with Angela. Angela gave them to Looking Glass to get his ex-wife to analyze them, so he did.
These things all happened on screen in the foreground with dialogue by the characters.
What baffles me is that you apparently missed all that but were sitting there calculating the characters’ ages in your mind over the course of episodes and scenes scattered throughout the series when their exact ages at different eras isn’t relevant to the plot. Same with the computer screen thing.
It seems to me that some people have forgotten how to understand a performance. I’ve used this phrase repeatedly—a fictional performance is not a fake documentary. When you go to a stage play you don’t wonder why every room has only three diagonal walls unless the play itself brings that to your attention. If the show doesn’t bring the thing about the characters’ ages or the computer screen to your attention then you’re not supposed to notice it, because it’s irrelevant.
A performance is an artifice, a magic trick, whether it’s on stage or on screen. It’s fake, and it’s meant to be so. It’s just a vehicle for telling a story. It’s people playing pretend and make believe.
Science fiction does depend on suspension of disbelief. The consumer is required to accept devices like giant psychic squids as plotlines. That’s why many people cannot “get” science fiction.
The flip side is the reward consumers receive from seeing how those crazy plotlines affect people just like them. When those people aren’t real, then the pleasure drains away.
We’ve had many threads talking about this phenomenon. The small things movies and tv get wrong bother many people far more than the big things included just for the fun of it. And there’s no need for these lapses. They’re just sloppiness.
Like the “lack” of computers. Tech is different in this world. Fine. Then why did the animal cloning center have two computer monitors on its reception desk? And just how do they think the CD players work if not with a computer chip? Sloppy.
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Sorry that I’m not having the immersive experience that you are. I forgot about the pills. That’s why I asked if I were missing something.
The small things that take you out of immersion in a fictional world are a real problem, though. Some people are bothered more than other people, and different small things will bother different people. The writers can’t be expected to deal with every one of them, even if they knew in advance which would wind up bothersome. Taking care of the major errors - the ones that are elements in the plot - is their responsibility, nevertheless.
That people have forgotten how to understand a performance is sheer nonsense. The average viewer is orders of magnitude more understanding of artifice than ever before.
When movies began, directors spent inordinate amounts of time getting characters through doors because they felt that viewers wouldn’t understand how the characters got to a new room. You’ll still see this in the 1930s. Flashbacks were slowly introduced as a device and accompanied by swirling pictures and flipping calendars and music cues to ram home the difference, to the point where this became a standing joke. Hundreds of narrative techniques had to be introduced and accustomed to over the decades so that today an episode like the last Watchmen, in which time and space and bodies are scrambled, can be easily followed by the average viewer. That was a showpiece of narrative technique, as advanced as anything I’ve seen on television. It will certainly be studied in film classes.
All that good work is undermined for some viewers who find their minds distracted by seeming trivialities. Once you get jerked out of the immersion it takes time to re-immerse. Until then you watch from a critical, in several senses, distance. If that never happens to you, consider yourself fortunate. When it happens to me, I’m going to complain in addition to offering praise. Why you don’t understand that baffles me.
And yet you will continue watching the show, right? The sloppiness is obviously not affecting whether you tune into this show or others like it. So maybe that’s why writers don’t care about creating a perfect product. People will eat it up regardless of how “bothered” they claim to be over picayune details.
It is strange to me that intelligent people such as yourself can fan-wank away the implausibility of a guy fighting off mobs all by himself without ever being knocked unconscious and thus having his identity (let alone his race) exposed. But they somehow can’t search their brains for a hypothesis that explains how an 18-year-old woman managed to secure a good job and a large apartment. That bothers them more than a pond full of cloned babies on Mars? Sorry, but this kind of biased incredulousness is ridiculous, and it shouldn’t be given a pass with a lame “That’s just how science fiction fans are”.
This is spot on. And it’s not just that they can’t come up with a hypothesis. It’s that they need a hypothesis at all. We don’t really need an answer to the question of why the guy is so good at fighting. No hypothesis is needed. It’s just the way things are in the story. So it should be the same with the 18 year old with an apartment and a job. Actually, the story never even asks you to calculate that she is 18. She’s just a Young adult of no specific age. That’s all the story needs.
This isn’t something that “happened” to you. The story didn’t tell you that she was 18 with a job and an apartment in New York. At some point you decided on your own, with no prompting from the story, to calculate her age. That’s not something that the story did to you. That’s something that you did to the story.
And then you assumed that your calculation must be true in the story—an assumption that the story itself doesn’t say anything about. And then you assumed you had some kind of authoritative knowledge about the plausibility of an 18-year-old woman’s living circumstances in New York City in the 1930s in an alternative fictional reality, none of which has any support in the story itself.
None of these things are things that the story gave you. You put in the time and effort to make all that up in your own head and then decide that the story was responsible for all that stuff that you conjured up.
I’ll put forth a different take. If one IS immersed it takes a lot of illogic to take you out of it. It takes a lot less when one isn’t. Exapno clearly wasn’t as immersed as many of us were. But many of us complain about less in less compelling shows.
It’s a boring day, so I’m home watching TV, including rewatching some of these episodes. In rewatching the fifth episode (Looking Glass’s origin story), I wonder about the continuing squid attacks. Somewhere we learned that Adrian Veidt was responsible for the giant squid attack on New York, but who is causing the tiny squid to rain down?
And the proposed tourism commercial for New York had one couple talk about how nice it was to walk through Central Park and not see another soul. That suggests that New York has been largely abandoned, which surprises me. But perhaps after three million dead, others moved out of the city and it’s been depopulated.
Viedt set it up in advance with the same technology that produced the first one including the teleportation device that kills them as it teleports them. All Redford and the government needed to do was follow the plan as laid out by him.
How did they get the original city-sized squid, and how did they transport it?
I imagine they’re using similar technology. It hasn’t been explicitly stated, so you’re going to have to use the same suspension of disbelief that you used to accept that creating a gigantic NYC-sized squid is possible, or that transporting it is possible. (In fact, we’ve already seen the transporter technology in use, so you’re halfway there!)
Senator Keene said that he was shown the Ozymandias video soon after he became a senator. So that means that the federal government is in on the ongoing hoax.