I’ve seen a number of posters here and elsewhere on the Interwebs say they don’t understand why the two leads in Brokeback Mountain insisted on making themselves miserable in heterosexual marriages rather than just running off and buying a little farm where they could live together as “friends”.
I can only guess that all of these people took a bathroom break during the scene in the movie where Jack suggests just such a plan and Ennis explains why he can’t do it:He doesn’t want to abandon his children, and he doesn’t want to meet the same fate as the two men who lived together as “friends” in his hometown. They were brutally murdered, and Ennis’s father made a point of taking young Ennis to see the corpses so he’d know what happened to men like that.
This is the type of thing I did all the time back on a now defunct website devoted to this sort of thing.
The one I remember most is a complaint about Lost in Space (1998), one of my guilty pleasures. The nitpick involved the fact that some of our heroes wind up in the future, and, in that future, Future Doc Smith tries to kill Past Doc Smith. The argument is that that would make Future Smith not exist.
I pointed out how the entire dystopic future happened because Will’s father doesn’t come back from the future. And, yet, at the end, Future Will uses the time machine he has been creating to send his father back. So obviously these two realities are no longer temporally linked.
But why? Well, we’d already been told why they wound up in teh future: they got caught up in a “time bubble”, a side effect of the effort needed to produce a time machine. And the very concept of creating a time machine to change the past requires disconnecting the future from the past so you can change the future. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that Will Robinson’s creating the time machine disconnected the future and past, and Smith, as his supposed mentor, also knew all about this.
A future commenter pointed out that was even shown explicitly in a deleted scene.
Except that he didn’t have two motives. Gene was only interested in getting more viewers. Then they changed the game later (ooh Russians!). Just like how Uhura and Kirk was the first black/white kiss when in fact, they never touched lips and it was filmed that way on purpose so you can’t see it.
Also kind of how Nichelle Nichols said so. Then lied about it later.
In one of the episodes of Firefly, we see the Reavers up close and personal, and see a previously-normal guy who’s turning himself into a Reaver. Mal speculates that too much exposure to that kind of savagery snaps a man’s sanity.
Later, in Serenity, we see that Reavers are the result of a human behavior modification experimental drug gone horribly wrong.
Which just means that there’s more than one way for a person to become a Reaver. The first ones came from the Pax drug, and later ones went insane from exposure to the earlier ones.
Also, Mal is not a psychologist, he’s a merchant captain and a criminal. This was a character in-universe wanking a theory as to why the guy is acting the way he is. for all we know, none of the Reavers are made that way, and this is just one poor unhinged fellow who has gone wacky.
This one is from Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, the Wing Commander movie, and various other examples: “If they can fly in space, why do they still use guns with bullets!?”
Because there is no causative relationship between spaceship engines and fricken laser beams?
True. But in some cases it goes too far the other way and we see characters using “future” weapons that don’t work as well as our current weapons. If a 9mm automatic works better than a hyper-neutrino disrupter, why switch?
It makes perfect sense. He’s back in time on Earth, not back in time where the Earth was two weeks ago. He’s just heading off an even more head-scratching question.
Firefly had a couple great bits of that. Two times we see laser pistols being used. Both times they ended up failing in comparison to good old slugthrowers and beatdowns.
Of course, the “Low Battery” thing in one episode was functionally the same as just running out of ammo. The fact that the guy didn’t have a spare battery is more a sign of how shortsighted he was than any flaw with the weapon.
Because the alien wasn’t killing the crew to eat them, it was capturing and cocooning them to be fodder for the face-huggers. Biological imperative and all that.
A related complaint was common for the show Stargate, why do the supposedly advanced Goauld use Zats and Staff blasters when they are so inefficient weapons even compared to human firearms like old AK-47s? The show itself addresses this a few times with characters comparing the weapons, calling the Goauld weapons tools of intimidation and human P-90s efficient killing machines of war. Once the most advanced race we have seen recruits the SG-1 team to help them fight self replicating machines because energy weapons are useless, and the humans have projectile weapons(guns) which do work, once again the show highlights how useless energy weapons are.
But that is all bullcrap!
The Goauld are technological scavengers and thieves, they don’t make much themselves. They are also spread out across the galaxy, some isolated and without contact. Projectile weapons like human guns require constant resupply and repair/maintenance, bullets have to be replaced and powder goes bad. Ammo stores only decades old are unreliable, old guns even when properly stored can jam or misfire or worse. Guns only make sense with a large industrial capacity and the ability to get constant supplies.
Zats and Staff blasters on the other hand are basically eternally working, they are made out of some kind of magic metal that is near indestructable and infinitely recharge themselves automagically(some kind of cold fusion?). You get some of these weapons and they will never break or need repair, and never run out of “bullets”. You can leave them in a cave and come back a century later and they are good to go.
It seems obvious that they are a lot more sensible than even the writers of the show think.
Col. Jack O’Neill commenting on a Goa’uld staff weapon “This is a weapon of terror. It’s made to intimidate the enemy.” vs. a FN P90 “This is a weapon of war. It’s made to kill your enemy.”
Season 5 episode 18 “The Warrior”
As I recall, at some point it is mentioned that the staff weapons and zat guns are fueled by a liquid form of Naquadah (the show’s resident form of Unobtanium)
The scene under discussion is in Empire when they are going to Bespin specifically because the hyperdrive is broken (and has been since they left Hoff, meaning they are definitely traveling between systems).
Actually, one of the times, the laser pistol fails in comparison to a different laser pistol. And that was a literal museum piece compared to a modern and well-maintained weapon. One gathers that the value of the laser pistol in that case was that it was lightweight and didn’t recoil, the proverbial “lady’s weapon”. The main drawback to personal laser weapons in the Firefly 'verse seems to be that they’re a lot more expensive than slugthrowers.
That’s how they approach lasguns in Warhammer 40K*. On paper they’re only as effective as a modern battle rifle would be. But they are sturdy as heck, and can recharge through diverse energy sources.
*(Of course, because everything is so hyper super duper powerful in the grim darkness of the far future, some sources say that a lasgun could carve through the best tank armor we have in existence on earth, but that’s BS because it only has a 1 in 2 chance of causing a casualty to an unarmored human if it functionally hits.)
What’s funny is that in real life, the FN P90 is defined as a Personal Defense Weapon and is not usually issued to front-line infantry, but rather to tank crews, policemen and the like. As such, calling it a weapon “made to kill you enemy” is a bit of a stretch.
“Rule of Cool.” It looks weird, and has 50 rounds, so it must be effective. The civilian version, the PS90, and the Five-seveN pistol, became rather popular when they first came out. Then I think people realized that it was expensive to feed and not very practical (see, Desert Eagle), and it now just occasionally shows up in movies and TV if they need a futuristic-looking weapon.