I swear, no show makes me want to scream at the TV like Smallville does. I remember a few seasons ago when Lex Luthor was all sad that his girlfriend was moving away to a medical school in another state, and I kept shouting at the screen: “You own a JET! Just go visit her! In your JET! Aghh!”
Last night, I had a similar reaction: “1000 degrees Kelvin! And he picked it up! With his bare hands! And injected it into his own arm! 1000 degrees Kelvin! ONE. THOUSAND. DEGREES. KELVIN! Gah!”
I can understand that they might not have a scientific consultant on their writing staff. But do none of the Smallville writers understand the concept of hot? Or that hot things burn, and may take a while to cool down? Did none of them bother to look up how hot 1000 degrees Kelvin actually was? That’s hot enough to melt aluminum! Pop cans, melting, and he picks it up with his bare hands?
Smallville writers: not bright enough to do a Google search, for heavens sake.
So the writers want me to believe that the 1000-degrees-Kelvin test tubes cooled off by 700 degrees in about three seconds, with no apparent cooling mechanism other than (possibly) the air outside the incubator. And that this massive wave of heat leaving the test-tubes didn’t fry off what little hair remains on Lex Luthor’s head (nostril hair, I suppose).
Well, something like that happened, according to the temperature monitor. Perhaps they had an advanced cooling system in there to rapidly cool samples once they’d been heated. I dunno.
The important questions to me are : If Clark could heat them that fast without destroying them, couldn’t the LuthorCorp techs have thrown them on a stove to speed up the process? Secondly, how the heck did the tubes survive that rapid cooling?
And Clark was able to wake up from his nightmares because the bacteria was influenced by meteor rock, which as we all know, can cause ordinary humans unending hassles – but which holds no sway over Clark Kent.
Here’s how one part of the script should have gone:
CHLOE: Looks like something fishy’s happening at Lex’s factory. Let’s sneak in.
CLARK: Hey, ahhh, jeez. Me and Lex are pretty good friends, and I’m a total do-gooder, in case you haven’t been paying attention. How about I just ask Lex if we can look around?
CHLOE: Wait, you know Lex, too? And you guys are friends? That’s kind of weird – I know Lex, too, and he cares so much about me that he faked my death and put me in witness protection over the summer. Maybe if you and I ask him to let us look around he can tell us where it is and isn’t safe to go. I mean, he probably feels pretty bad about Jason getting sick from something in his factory. He can probably give us the MSDS on whatever it is, or let us talk to the OSHA supervisor for the plant.
CLARK: Jinkies! What a plan.
CHLOE: Nah, f*ck it – let’s see if he’ll let us off with another misdemeanor for trespassing on Luthercorp property with someone else’s ID badge. My relative who works here doesn’t need his job that badly.
They always toss out a few lines that beg to be shouted at…
CHLOE: Lex makes a super-secret killer microbe at a so-called fertilizer plant, and nobody says a word? That’s ludicrous!
ME: Looks like you just got promoted from The Torch to the Scripts Department.
LANA: Who will love me now?
ME: Nobody, you shallow b*tch.
You, sir, have a generous definition of “debunked”.
The fact that the writers of this show occasionally can’t write their way out of a wet paper sack?
One CO[sub]2[/sub] fire extinguisher from the props department, hidden in the innards of the “incubator” and set to go off for a second or two, and the magical cooling of the test-tubes would at least have made sense. But I really don’t think the writers understand how hot 1000K is, or that that heat energy wouldn’t just magically disappear. I really think they just decided 1000K was a cool-sounding temperature.
The writers have their moments: Chloe’s nightmare scene was nicely done. But could they please buy a physics textbook for themselves?
How so? The temperature guage was shown to immediately drop down to a reasonable temperature, which you must have missed when you watched it (I usually miss ~1/2 of the show, as I’m usually busy around the apartment on Wednesdays). Complaining that “Did none of them bother to look up how hot 1000 degrees Kelvin actually was?” when they made a specific effort to show that the tube dropped 700 Kelvin seems to indicated that they did, in fact, Google to look up how hot 1000 Kelvin actually was.
Hey, Candid’s explanation may have holes, but there’s nothing that says a Luthor Corp. tech can’t utilize a super-fast cooling vent. The piece of equipment that the tubes were in was connected to the ceiling.
That just pushes the plot hole back a step. Saying that the temperature of the tubes dropped 700 degrees in a few seconds, by itself, is not a satisfactory explanation as to why Lex Luthor’s hand isn’t a blackened stump. How was this achieved? Where did the heat energy go? A vent in the ceiling couldn’t possibly cool anything that quickly unless either (a) the vent was blowing air at a ridiculous speed, in which case there should at least have been a breeze when Lex opened the door, or (b) the air in the chamber went suddenly from super-hot to super-cold, again with no visible mechanism for doing so, which just pushes the plot hole back a step further (not to mention having the same problem as in (a), i.e. why there wasn’t a breeze when the super-cold air came into contact with the room-temperature air).
Showing the temperature dropping on a gauge isn’t any better than the writers walking into the shot and saying “the tubes cooled off because we said so”.
Basically, originally, you were wondering why Lex wasn’t burned. The answer is, as presented by the evidence in the show : because when he got the tubes out, they were at a more normal temperature, as was everything in the chemical hood.
Now, we certainly can speculate as to the cooling technology employed (perhaps the hot air is rapidly exchanged for cool air, and the tubes rest on some material that accepts heat transference readily - maybe that’s why they were taking so long to heat) - but honestly, is it any less plausible than a man who can, with beams from his eyes, heat something over 400+ degrees Kelvin in a few seconds? Without melting the material in the way?
We’re arguing about how a test tube can be cooled 700K in a few seconds without melting Lex’s arm, and not how Clark can use his heat vision and remain clothed? Or that the superheated-air between him and the object doesn’t sizzle everyone within 20 feet?
I’ll take the undisclosed Luthor Corp. tech in the chemical hood over that, any day.
**Josephus H. Christ on a sesame-seed cracker!! They’re METEORITES, not “meteor rocks.” **
In SPACE they are METEROIDS. In the atmosphere they are METEORS. Once they hit the earth they are freaking METEORITES. It’s not that hard, guys; all I’m asking is that you watch one episode of 3 2 1 Contact.
In other news, hot things can burn you. I never thought I’d be saying that and not meaning it as a joke.
(Also re: the tubes: Even accepting the rapid cooler technology (which I don’t) doesn’t explain why A) the tubes didn’t shatter and B) if being heated rapidly didn’t ruin the antidote, why they were heating them so slowly to begin with?
Not to mention how Lex knew it would work not only as a vaccine, but as an antidote, solely on the evidence that he didn’t immediately die after injecting it.)
Clark gets to break the laws of physics. That’s the premise of the show, and so Clark shooting heat beams from his eyes and displaying other quasi-magical powers isn’t bad writing. Test tubes, on the other hand, aren’t the Last Son of Krypton. Hence, test tubes are expected to obey the laws of physics. Test tubes exhibiting quasi-magical powers are examples of bad writing.
And the fact that we can think up plausible explanations if we postulate the existence of magical technologies hiding off-camera doesn’t make the writing better. We shouldn’t have to shake our heads and say “Oh, well clearly LutherCorp has not only invented a superconductor of heat, they did it so long ago that the technology is commonplace enough to be not even worth mentioning.” It’s the writer’s job to bridge those gaps, not ours.
One lousy fire extinguisher. Hell, just some dry ice and a fan to spit out cold looking mist at the right time. Is that too much to ask?
Maybe it is Clark that’s responsible. Maybe his heat vision is a focused pyrokinetic effect - and whatever he’s heating returns to normal quickly thereafter - unless it has, in the meantime, caught on fire.
You’re taking it way too seriously.
The fact remains - the test tubes, when Lex got’em, were under 300 K.
