In movies and books, unnecessary precision. Especially when stated by someone who should obviously know better.
“The high was 16 degrees yesterday.” (Where, by context, the speaker means Fahrenheit.)
“So it was -8.89 Centigrade?”
“Oh, the ribbon was about ten inches long.”
“So it was 25.40 centimeters long.”
And in Serenity, when they fly thru the Reaper fleet, they are packed in there like sardines. Space is vast. If you flew thru the asteroid belt, you might see one or two as rocks, and maybe a couple glinting in the reflected sunlight way way off.
I’m willing to overlook spatial distances because if you don’t, everything is boring. Real space battles would be over before you knew they were taking place.
That, I think we can explain with “Reapers aren’t rational”. There’s plenty of room that they could spread out more. But they don’t. Just like they tune their engines in such a way as to produce dangerous (to them) levels of radiation in their ships. Maybe they have some odd psychological drive for togetherness, that overrides the arguments against fleeting so closely. Maybe they have a drive for risk, and they’re actually in such close formation because it risks a collision. It’s tough to analyze the crazy.
All of these criticisms apply to pretty much all space opera type stories. Star Wars combat in soace is basically iust fighter plane combat as it would be on Earth.
The Expanse is the only show I can think of that even tried to depict real space combat, and it still had to make all kinds of compromises for the audience. But I appreciate the effort.
I still think the criticism of ‘Vera needing air around her’ is misplaced. For one thing, they never said why. My fanwank is that Vera has ‘auto fire’, which isn’t full auto but some sort of automated aiming (when River shot a bunch of guards without looking, Kaylee said, “She just did the math. It weren’t auto-fire”).
If you are going to aim at something, you need to know air pressure, wind speed, etc. So maybe Vera is just festooned with sensors to aid its automation, and they don’t work in a vacuum. It never had to be about oxidizer in the propellant.
So long as there are plausible explanations like that, I can accept it. Of courae, what actually happened is that Whedon actually consulted a weapons advisor, and they gave him bad info. The fact that he did do the consultation makes it better for me as well. At least it wasn’t just a lack of caring or sloppiness.
how a lot of tv movies and shows depict video games drive me nuts
Like when a kid is playing an Xbox game on tv with a super Nintendo box and a Coleco controller from 1982 and the sound of the game is either atari 2600 Pac man or donkey kong …
Or they’ll be playing a mid-90s pc game with a debadged commodore 64 keyboard hooked up to a VIC 20 …
Here’s one for me. I just recently got around to watching Knives Out, and the medication inaccuracies bothered me, a lot more than usual. Sure, lots of shows get medical stuff wrong, but this seemed so obvious, in an otherwise tight, well-crafted narrative, that it pulled me out of the movie. I couldn’t stop wondering if it was an intentional plot twist that was going to lead somewhere, or a careless plot hole that wasn’t.
This didn’t really bother me, because I expect my comic book law to be about as accurate as my comic book science, but in the latest episode of She-Hulk, her client is suing an elf from New Asgard. The elf’s lawyer argues, “Her father is an Asgardian diplomat, so she has diplomatic immunity!” And the judge shoots that down by telling him, “We’re not in New Asgard, so that doesn’t apply.” Which is precisely how diplomatic immunity does not work.
I believe any subject that you are adept at or is your career are the subjects whose inaccuracies most pull you out of the story. Medical dramas do so for me, particularly those that are soap opera-ish, like Grey’s Anatomy (which my daughter tortures me to sit through).
Residents and interns don’t deal with a hospital full of the most obscure deadly medical conditions on a daily basis and have only seconds to save the day. They don’t regularly have sex with each other in the broom closet. They don’t stay with patients every minute of their hospital admission. They don’t have fistfights with each other and with patients and administrators. They don’t print 3D replacement organs. They don’t operate without eye protection/visors. They don’t drop their hands below their waists after scrubbing in for a procedure. And they don’t operate on themselves (as I recall, one episode of GA had the former chief of surgery direct abdominal surgery on himself in the OR).
But, I get it. Portraying a realistic hospital setting would be pretty boring (same with law enforcement shows I suppose). If I think of these shows as rom-coms instead of a dramas, I’m good.
This is kinda why errors that really annoy me are the ones that are way out of my field, because I think “If I know this, so does any shlub fact-checker.”
So, one that not only bugs me, but pisses me off, is the Monk where he meets the woman who got his wife’s corneas for transplant. I am willing to overlook the idea that someone killed by a car bomb could be a cornea donor. What pissed me off, is that they gave the name of the recipient’s malady, and it was Retinitis Pigmentosa.
Retinitis Pigmentosa is a loss of vision due to pigment collecting in the retina, reducing its photoreceptivity. It has nothing to do with the cornea.
It’s Monk. They could have made up a fake name for the disease, if they didn’t feel like looking up a real reason for a cornea transplant. This was a whopping gonzo of a goof.
Exactly. Vera, in fact, makes me think better of Whedon, because it showed that he was thinking about his world, not just making a war story IN SPAAAACE!
Generally, I agree. If it’s a compressed timeline, rule of cool, or a limited casting decision it bothers me least. With Knives Out, they made multiple errors with the drugs that could easily have led to a major plot reversal, So it bothered me most.
I didn’t see Knives Out. I did, however, enjoy Dead Ringers (1988). Not very believable, but a pretty kick-ass macabre horror flick! Loved the custom surgical instruments. 
I read this one differently, that the elf is a diplomat TO New Asgard from some other place where there are shape shifting elves. Since the courtroom was not in New Asgard, that immunity does not apply.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense.
I’ve been watching Murder She Wrote, and for the most part I haven’t noticed anything that bothers about the way Mrs. Fletcher solves the mysteries. The episode I watched last night was an exception. It’s an episode from season 1, where Mrs. Fletcher goes to Texas, falls, breaks her foot, and ends up in the hospital. What bothered me was that she used the fact that someone was watching the 11 o’clock news to help pin down the timing of the murder. Of course, with Texas being on central time, in those days at 11 o’clock people would have been watching Johnny Carson or David Letterman at that hour, not the local news. Ok, some small number might have been watching the last minute of Nightline with Ted Koppel, but they wouldn’t have been watching the local news.
On the other hand, I got a kick out of the fact that Martin Kove made a guest appearance as one of the doctors taking care of Mrs. Fletcher, and in one scene he was putting a cast on her leg. Given his actions in Karate Kid, that made me laugh a little 
.
If it’s the local news, wouldn’t it come on at 11pm, local time?
I live in the Central Time Zone and there is no local news that comes on at 11 pm. Unless it is delayed by some sporting event or something similar (Special New Report)
Prime Time is 7 pm to 10 pm.
I live in Texas, and nightly news always came on at 10
Depends on the time zone- when I’ve traveled the local news on network affiliates always comes on after the last network prime-time show , so when prime time is 7-10, the CBS station’s local news is at 10pm. If prime time is 8-11, the CBS station’s local news is at 11pm. And independent stations usually have their news an hour before the network affiliate news but it could also be an hour after the network news.