I’ve been really trying to like this show. I’m not expecting it to be plausible or even internally self-consistent, and I’m willing to overlook the occasional mangling of the laws of physics and random technobabble. I was willing to ignore the old “Humans only use 10% of their brains” nonsense in the last episode. But the plot holes, errors in historical fact, and supidity on the part of all the main characters in the 8/22 episode was just too much for me. Think I’ll be finding something more productive to do with my Tuesday nights now.
A cold-war era doomsday device has been accidentally activated, a cannon of some kind that bounces an ion beam off a mirror on the moon to destroy any target on the planet. A big deal was made about how this weapon was part of the MAD nuclear deterrent scheme, preventing a nuclear war by guarenteeing that all sides would be completely wiped out. When accidentally activated a 24 hour countdown begins till it fires and starts world war III. Nobody can figure out how to shut it off. The scientist who built it had a permanent mental breakdown 40 years ago. Much of the episode revolves around finding him and getting him to shut the weapon off.
Now, the immediate thought I had is, what good is a nuclear deterrent that takes 24 hours to fire? A nuclear war will be over in well under 24 hours. The weapon will be firing at cities that are already radioactive craters. Assuming that the weapon itself wasn’t nuked in that time, of course, which it almost certainly will have been. Of course, if the weapon had been designed with a more realistic firing time of a few minutes, there would have been no stopping it and everyone would have died, but since the writers never even attempted to give a reason for the long countdown this is simply an unexplained plot contrivance to make the episode possible.
Secondly, the existance of the weapon was completely unknown to everyone, even the people in the town and the facility where it was built. But the weapon was supposed to be a nuclear deterrent - they made a point in the episode of stating that the very reason it was built was to prevent nuclear war by assuring retaliatory destruction. Nuclear deterrents that are totally secret don’t work; the entire point of the deterrent is that the enemy knows that you have a weapon that can wipe him out utterly.
The weapon was supposed to work by bouncing a beam off the moon. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the moon is only going to be above the horizon for 12 out of every 24 hours. And in order for the beam to hit a target, the moon has to be above the horizon at both the beam source and the target; depending on what location you’re targeting, the weapon may be useable only a few hours out of the day. This will also make it useless as a deterrent - a nuclear attack which takes place during a time that the weapon can’t be used can destroy it with no chance of retaliation.
The weapon is supposed to reflect a beam off mirrors placed on the moon during the Apollo missions. The weapon was built by a scientist who afterwards suffered a total mental breakdown, which was stated as having happened 40 years ago. Apparantly none of the writers even bothered to look up just when the Apollo missions were, or they’d have realized that when the weapon was being built the moon landings were still years in the future.
The sheriff and his people mention the possibility of using explosives or other brute-force methods to destroy the control mechanism, but decide against it for fear of triggering a fail-safe mechanism that would fire the beam immediatly. For some reason it never occurs to anybody to simply try and destroy the exposed beam emitters that have emerged all over town, or to wait till the moon goes below the horizon to attempt brute-force destruction. Don’t tell me they’re indestructibe. Given 24 hours and free access to call in resources from across the country, nothing is indestructible. Call every demolition company in the country and have the beam emitters wired with hundreds of pounds of shaped-charged explosives. You might level half the town, but 24 hours is far more than enough time to evacuate everyone, and what’s loosing a small town compared to stopping WWIII? Or call in earthmovers and construction equipment and bury the emitters in dirt and fast-setting concrete. They obviously can’t fire through a significant thickness of earth, since they had to emerge from the ground before firing rather than simply fire from underground. Or, since you know a simple mirror can deflect the beam, simply cover the emitters with a shell of inward-facing mirrors, so that when they fire the beam reflects back and destroys them. Come on, people, you’ve got 24 hours and a town full of super-geniuses, yet you need the sheriff’s daughter to come up with a contrived and unlikely plan to save the day?
Finally, when they do manage to get the weapon’s inventor back to some semblance of sanity so he can shut off the weapon, the first thing he does is go back to the town nursing home and gather the other scientists who helped him built it. Which makes some sense - a single man couldn’t have built a machine like that unassisted - until you realize that this implies that in all the time they were trying to figure out how to shut down the weapon, the sheriff and his people never once thought to find the retired scientists who worked in the town when the weapon was being built and ask if any of them worked on it.
And that’s the point I threw the remote at the TV. I can take a lot of stupidity from a TV show, but Eureka found and exceeded my limit.